Reviews with content warning for Homophobia - Cien años de soledad

The most confusing part of this book is the names. But! It's clear that was intentional. Everything else? Pretty lovely. (I don't mean that literally for every aspect. Don't cancel me.)

Content Warnings

ran_sophia's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

The book reads me well and I was able to orient in the story, which surprised me quite a bit.

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gemmae's review against another edition

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challenging reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I don't review a lot of books, but this book was just fantastic. I legitimately feel compelled to boost the score of this novel because it is just so good! I have so many good things I wish I could say but to summarize I think that One Hundred Years of Solitude is the most satisfying book I've ever read. Easily my favorite book now.

Édit: upon second read still my fav book

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catapocalypse's review against another edition

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challenging funny reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

There is so, so much to say about this book.

First, I can't believe how seldom its humor is brought up by others! There's a lot of focus placed on the heavy, cynical, serious elements, but there's also many absurd and silly and tongue-in-cheek and clever elements!

Even while mixing all those things, García Márquez subtly shifts the feel of the narrative as it progresses. Mind, this is an entirely character-driven story, with little to no real plot beyond the lifespan of the Buendía family and their town of Macondo. Folks who prefer plot-driven stories may find this book incredibly boring! But as time passes, the family, town, and narrative itself seem to shift and mature in a way. The beginnings of all three feature many fantastic elements. There are flights of fancy viewed with an almost childlike wonder. Time feels more sprawling.

But as things progress, they become more grounded in reality (though never entirely), and more serious events and concerns pop up. The little town of Macondo starts without even a mayor, but gradually sees Colonel Aureliano Buendía's war, the influence of foreign colonizing powers, and the high tension of the banana company worker strikes. Time gradually speeds up to the hurricane pace of the ending.

Across this lifespan of the Buendía family and Macondo, there's a lot going on, and García Márquez brilliantly connects all of it together. Even fanciful elements are not careless. I feel it has high reread value, and might even consider an immediate reread if I didn't have so much else to get to right now.

I do have some warnings. While the narrative is fairly linear in time, there are some overlapping points where events are retraced when the focus has moved between characters. This isn't so bad, so long as you can keep track of the many similarly-named ones. I recommend an edition that provides a family tree, like that from Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

There are also many Content Warnings, some rather significant, so please check out those listed for the book on its entry!

The prevalence of some of this, especially of the incest and problematic relationships between adults and minors, will definitely turn off some readers, which is valid! I was conflicted on its inclusion the entire way through, but ultimately, I think it ties into the presentation of the Buendía family as being deeply flawed. Let's face it, Úrsula was probably right about everything all along.

I'm sure there are even further layers I'm not fathoming. I do think that this book fully deserves its status as a classic, and I will absolutely read more Gabriel García Márquez.

Content Warnings

sherbertwells's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I cannot pick out a single sentence or paragraph to quote from One Hundred Years of Solitude, the famous novel by Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, because presenting such a small fragment of the text would erase its magic. The story’s individual episodes, which chronicle the rise and fall of the Buendía family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo, are iconic in their own right. But reviews like mine (and John Green’s, which encouraged me to read this book) can’t capture its appeal in full. Nevertheless, it is a wonderful and terrible (that is, terror-inspiring) story that wasn’t my favorite book but might become yours.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a classic today because its story is gorgeously told. Translator Gregory Rabassa does a great job presenting the original Spanish sentences in clear-but-whimsical English, but Márquez deserves most of the credit. Every description or phrase is precise and luscious, from riverstones “like prehistoric eggs” to wind “full of voices from the past...murmurs of ancient geraniums, sights of disenchantment that preceded the most tenacious nostalgia” (1, 415). Between its covers I encountered the names for a thousand conditions that I had experienced but only now recognized in the narratives of fictional characters.

Some of those characters are pretty neat. Since One Hundred Years of Solitude takes place over a century, individual Buendías frequently step into out out of the spotlight, appearing just often enough to perpetuate the family curse in their own unique way. While most female characters conform to the patriarchal attitudes of the 19th- and 20th century—Fernanda and Petra Cotes in particular embody the worst parts of the virgin-whore dichotomy—Úrsula, the matriarch, is a real badass. She’s tenacious. While she isn’t a soldier or a scholar like her male relatives, she saves their lives several times with her stubbornness and knowledge of medicine, and without her influence the family fortunes really start to go downhill. The Roma scholar Melquiades and the second-to-last Aureliano are also neat, since their pursuit of knowledge frames the story. But everyone else is a bit of a disaster.

Stories with horrible, ambiguously-framed characters can sometimes be shocking or cathartic, but the rape, pedophilia and incest in this book occur so casually that I’m not even sure they happened. For example, Remedios Moscote marries Colonel Aureliano Buendía a month after getting her first period but “before getting over the habits of her childhood” (84). Amaranta Buendía sexually abuses two of her underage nephews, and one looks back on the experience with longing! Meanwhile, the first encounter of Amaranta Úrsula and Aureliano is an initially-nonconsensual “battle to the death” (396). If all three of these affairs weren’t framed as dramatic romances, perhaps they would merely be manifestations of the screwed-up Buendía family dynamic. As is, I feel like José Arcadio Segundo after a particularly spoiler-y incident: That just happened, didn’t it? It was awful, wasn’t it? Am I supposed to see the ramifications of abuse in the same way I see the plague of insomnia or the Assumption of Remedios the Beauty, as normal parts of life in Macondo?

Some people enjoy One Hundred Years of Solitude’s glorious moral ambiguity, and I suspect most of my disdain for it is merely a matter of taste. So is my ambivalence to the novel’s other affairs. Before reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I had no idea how much of the story was about sex. It’s the foundation for approximately 90% of the romances and 65% of the plot points, and while some amount of romantic shenanigans is par for the course in a family saga, it feels like every time a character is about to learn something or change history they get distracted by an attractive stranger/villager/relative! Maybe it’s a Buendía thing. It’s just not mine.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a classic novel of magnificent quality. My conflicted reaction to the story isn’t ambivalence, but a mixture of great love and mild personal dislike. Like the tangled Buendía family tree, the parts I love depend on the parts I don’t, and even now I can’t split them up.

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