by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Gregory Rabassa, Translator)
Marquez's magical realism renders a breathtaking 100 year
history of the Buendia family.
Reviewed by: Rachel C. Lee
About Rachel C. Lee
Reading this book is like learning to read again. It reawakens the child
who is able to perceive reality with magic, a reality both terrible and
beautiful. 'One Hundred Years of Solitude,' which reads almost like a
faerie tale for adults, charts the lives of the Buendia family. Incredibly
rendered by Marquez's magical realism, the Buendia family exists both
vividly and fantastically. Characterized by various quirks, myths, and
magic, these characters occupy a remarkable world where nothing is
impossible; folklore holds the secret of science, a girl eats dirt to taste
of her ancestors, a child carries the noisy bones of her parents, the
beautiful float away into the sky. Yet the childish innocence which so
often accompanies such magical worlds is tempered by the vibrant humanity
exhibited by the Buendia family in their solitudes, sadness, failures, and
deaths.
Stripped of the sterility of typical modernity, the known world once more
becomes richly textured with the unknown and mysterious; the world is
reborn a wonder. Members of a single family become complicated figures of
mythic proportion; heroes, explorers, lovers, beautiful, immortal,
tragically flawed. Solitude is the inherent human condition of this world.
Yet this solitude is more than a solitary state of loneliness; it is
oblivion and refuge, private and terrible, paradise and desert, privileged
and decrepit, something defeated or nurtured, delicate and complex. It is
impossible to read this book without self-examination.
Navigating this hundred year solitude led me to re-examine my own
relationship with solitude, to find its alchemy at work in my world. The
magic of childhood once more entered my life as reality becomes a matter of
perception. Solitude is the story of all of us, communally and
individually. One of the effects of experiencing 'One Hundred Years of
Solitude' is a renewed hope, an acceptance, a worldly wisdom which embraces
the fragility of life, the impermanence of death, the terrible beauty of
love.
Click here to buy this book, or read more about it at Amazon.com: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Copyright © by Rachel C. Lee, 2002
Reviewed by Rachel C. Lee
:
-- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
-- Swoon
- by Nada Gordon and Gary Sullivan
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