Thursday, August 14, 2014

Book # 8 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

28088Well this book was different from anything I've read before. One Hundred Years of Solitude is about the Buendia family and their town of Macondo. Chronologically it starts with Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula as they leave their hometown with a few other families and found a new village. From there the book follows the family for the next six generations! And these characters have pretty interesting lives so there is a ton of plot. I'd say there is more plot in the first twenty pages than in any volume of Remembrance of Things Past. There really is enough story here for thousands of pages but it is all crammed into 450 pages.

The main theme of the story seems to be that each generation tends to make the same mistakes as the previous generation and thus prevent themselves from being happy. Each generation is pretty similar to the generations before it, they even use the same names over and over. There are five characters named Aureliano and Jose. The story also has some fantasy elements to it that no one in the story thinks is weird (one characters literally ascends to heaven and another is always followed by butterflies, and a couple live to about 150 years old).

Overall I enjoyed the book, mostly because it was different from anything else. However, I could have done with a bit less story... with so many events and characters it took some effort to remember how everyone was connected to one another. Also the ending was pretty satisfying. I'll give it an A.

No comments:

Post a Comment