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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Read via audiobook, which was perhaps not the greatest choice.
Rating: 2/5
Pages: 448
Started: 11 January 2024
Finished: 17 January 2024
Summary:
One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the whimsical history the remote Colombian village of Macondo through tales of the Buendía family. From inventors to soldiers to generals to cow farmers, through all their magical and chaotic adventures the Buendía family stands as colorful proof of the inevitable cyclicality of life.
Thoughts:
The fact that this was an over four-hundred-page book whose main themes were incest, cyclicality, and the word "solitude" does not paint a particularly complimentary picture of this novel, and yet here we are. The whimsicality of the book was fun; magical realism is a very nice genre, and Marquez did it very well. However, the writing itself (at least the English translation) wasn't particularly impressive, and the story was nonsensical. So many José Arcadios Buendías and Aureliano Buendías; especially reading this book as an audiobook, it was very hard to follow.
The amount of incest was also insane. I was not aware of any characters who did not have sex with their mother or their sister or their aunt; it made me wildly uncomfortable. And the born-with-a-pig-tale threat was so obviously stated so many times that it was clear that was how the story was going to end.
I can understand how this book, all its various symbols etc, could be analyzed in a literature class and have value, but despite the magical realism elements it was not a pleasant book to read for fun.