Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was my first foray into "literary" fiction in a while, and I think I made a good decision. It's been hard for me to get excited about stories without fantastical elements after reading exclusively sci-fi for so long, but magical realism is a good compromise, and on top of that I'm making an effort to read non-white authors this year. In general, I very much enjoyed the prose and the challenge of the unorthodox story structure. The lack of traditional narrative structure and the patchwork feel of the interwoven tales of the individual members of the Buendia family did make it a little touch to get through at times, though.

The story follows the descendants of Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula, who together helped found a city and a formidable family line. My difficulties and complaints with the novel are pretty typical - most of the characters have very similar names, and there's no "plot" as such so skipping around between anecdotes can get kind of confusing - but I understand and appreciate the emphasis on the cyclical nature of families. I also really feel that this would read better in Spanish than it did in English, but that's a failing on my part, not the novel's.

There are points where there does seem to be a plot - there's a war (or wars) going on, people fall in love, etc. - and when the story runs with the same characters or the same events for a while, it's engaging and beautiful.

I usually do a plot synopsis for most of the books I read, but that just won't work for this one, so I'll leave this review short.

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