One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I knew this book was famous and that its author had won a Nobel Prize; in fact, I was slightly concerned about reading it because I usually find that books which are covered in impressive accolades fail to live up to their hype. ('The greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years', boasts the Penguin edition on the front cover - crikey! I'd better like it then, or I'm clearly an ignorant savage.) However, I was totally unaware that it was a 'magical realism' novel, which would have been useful to know before I started reading it with more conventional expectations. I have not read anything from this genre before, but it seems to mean that when amazingly ...  Read the complete review

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Recently stocking up on a selection of books to read on my daily commute, I came across One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the Penguin Classics section. Despite having not heard of either the book or the author I picked it up and read the back cover. The blurb was unstinting; calling it a 'great masterpiece' and stating 'Blending political reality with magical realism this is one of the most daringly original works of the twentieth century'. Blimey. It also boldly adds that it is a winner of the Nobel prize for literature. Good ...  Read the complete review

An epic of astonishing range and depth; a family saga; a history of Columbia; an exploration of the human condition. Gabriel Gracia Marquez's Cien Anos de Soledad is all this and more. First published in 1967, it was the central novel in the "Latin Boom" of South American writing in the 1960s and 70s. The appeal of the novel has not diminished since its publication; accordoing to W.L Webb, writing in The Guardian, it "continues to inspire in readers throughout the world a devotion-like conversion to some benign new religion." Marquez narrates the history of Macondo, a fictionalised Columbian town, from its ...  Read the complete review

?One Hundred Years of Solitude? marked the breakthrough for Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it was the novel that made his name and launched him into the public consciousness. Since then, he has gone on to cement his reputation as a writer of international renown with such works as ?Love in the Time of Cholera`, and the excellent factual description of modern-day Columbia in ?News of a Kidnapping?. Marquez denies that ?100 Years? has any great basis in his own life in the backwaters of Columbia, but I feel that there must surely be some parallels there, albeit ones obscured and warped into beautifully strange (and perhaps almost unrecognisable) shapes by the author?s ...  Read the complete review

A mixture of the fantastic and earthy, this is a masterpiece. Gabriel Garcia Marquez chronicles the story of a family, and a story of the growth of his country Colombia, across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From settlers in a wilderness, they found a town – Macondo , scene of many of his writings – then are lost in the tumult of change. Using the technique of 'magical realism', he blends the incredible with mundane life. From Galleons rotting in the forests to the repression of plantation owners and the brutal civil wars. Each character is equally a combination of the extraordinary and the human, a headstrong dynasty that forms ...  Read the complete review