Book Review -- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is considered a masterpiece. It won the Nobel prize for literature after being published in 1967. It is the one of the best selling Spanish books of all time.

With all that being said, I did not enjoy the book. To me, the title seemed appropriate because it felt like I needed 100 years of solitude to get through the 450 pages.

The book chronicles the history of several generations of the Buendia family during the rise and fall of the fictional town of Macondo. The Buendia family is the founding and most prominent family in the town.

I can appreciate the unique writing style that Garcia Marquez invented with this book. I can also appreciate the great creativity required to create an intricate and colorful fictional town. However, I just did not find the book that entertaining. There is no real plot, in the traditional sense. The book reads more like a diary of a crazy old aunt recounting family history --filled with exaggerations, superstitions, and folk legend -- rather than an actual novel. The book also combines fantasy with reality. There were descriptions of day-to-day life in the Buendia family, when suddenly some supernatural miracle would occur. For example, one character suddenly floats off to heaven while folding laundry. Other characters live to be 150 years old. In that respect, One Hundred Years of Solitude reminded me of the Old Testament of The Holy Bible.

One other criticism was that the names of the characters were too similar. Several of the characters had the same first and/or last names (as children were born and named after previous generations). This made it often difficult to keep track of the characters. When I looked up the novel on Wikipedia, there was a family tree. I wish I had such a family tree available to me while reading the novel to help keep all the characters straight.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is highly acclaimed. It has been translated into 27 different languages, and won numerous international awards. It is taught in schools as a classic and propelled the author (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) into the highest echelon of modern authors. So what do I know? Perhaps I just don't "get it" when it comes to this novel, but the bottom line is that I was not entertained by the book. Isn't the point of reading a work of fiction to be entertained (or educated) at some level?