Reviews with content warning for Religious bigotry - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Siempre disfruto mucho dem realismo mágico.
Intenté leer este libro hace muchos años y me exasperó el hecho de que todos se llamaban igual. Esta segunda vez disfruté mucho de la primera parte del libro y pude entender que sus destinos estaban sellados por los nombres, estaban condenados a repetirse.
Me gustó mucho cómo se manejó el tiempo como algo cíclico a pesar de que generalmente odio ese tipo de historias porque creo que forzar a los personajes a terminar en el mismo lugar en el que empezaron estanca su crecimiento y es un retroceso en la mayoría de los casos.
Sin embargo creo que es un libro DEMASIADO largo. La primera parte es muy entretenida pero los personajes de la segunda mitad no son tan interesantes como los de la primera.
Fernanda es insufrible y sus hijos también, la historia decayó a partir de que ella llegó.

Además de que todo el incesto y la pedofilia me parecieron sumamente desagradables. Esa fue la razón de que no pudiera llegar ni a la mitad del libro la primera vez y saber que es el tema más recurrente en el libro. García Marquez te lo quiere poner como que es el amor y que el último Aureliano terminó con todo porque sí fue concebido con amor pero fue resultado de una relación incestuosa. Es el segundo libro de García Marquez que leo que tiene esos temas y hace que me de miedo leer más de él porque qué perro asco. Espero que se lo hayan comido las hormigas también a él por viejo cochino

Content Warnings

lief_'s review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional medium-paced

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

5.0

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sploack's review against another edition

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challenging mysterious sad slow-paced

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

1.0

What the hell did I just read? Not only does this book not have any plot whatsoever, but it also seamlessly normalizes sexism, violence, cheating, incest, animal abuse, child abuse and pedophilia. And is there even a single likeable character in the whole story? In my opinion they’re all shamelessly terrible people.

Its only merit is that it is well written, but that can’t save it from me giving it 1 star.

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bluejayreads's review against another edition

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slow-paced

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

4.75

I mainly picked this up because I put it on hold at the library during a (very brief) classics-reading kick earlier this year and promptly forgot about it. When it came available, I figured I might as well read it.

This story chronicles six-ish generations of the Buendía family and the small town of Macondo. Family heads José Arcadio and Úrsula, along with a group of unrelated other people, take a long trek into the jungle and build a town. Their family grows, their children have children of their own, and the Buendía family gets bigger – in number, in wealth, in stature in the town. Times change, war happens, the town becomes less isolated, new scientific inventions happen, the family begins to disperse away from the town. The town of Macondo rises, and then falls, with the Buendía family.

This is a weird book, but from my limited experience with magical realism, this is weird in ways consistent with the genre. It’s like the real world, but a little to the left. Alchemy is a thing that works, there’s a side character who may be immortal or may be already dead, one character gets medical treatment from psychic doctors who are thousands of miles away, a character gets taken up into heaven, and nobody views this as at all out of the ordinary. In fact, magnifying glasses and turning metal into gold are treated with equal seriousness and excitement, like the ability to put the right ingredients into a pot and turn them into gold is a neat scientific advancement like curving glass to make things bigger.

The thing that surprised me the most about this book is that for all its century-spanning scale and magical realism bizarreness, it’s remarkably human. None of these characters are great people, but they’re all doing their best in their circumstances. I found something relatable in every character – in Úrsula’s resourcefulness in keeping the family functional; in José Arcadio’s desire to learn all about cool new things; in Fernanda’s rigid adherence to rules; in Amaranta Úrsula’s desire to leave the small town where she grew up and grow in the wider world; in Remedios the Beauty’s … well, let’s be honest, Remedios the Beauty was who I wish I could be. There are six generations of Buendías, each of whom love and lose, grow and die, succeed, fail, make mistakes, and ultimately just are in all their messy glory. It sounds pretentious to say this book is about the human condition, but it kind of is.

My biggest struggle was keeping the characters straight. Normally I would blame this on the audiobook format, and it is what caused my difficulty remembering Arcadio and Aureliano were two different characters. But the book itself doesn’t make it easy on me, either. This family reuses names a lot – there are three José Arcadios (and one just Arcadio), three Remedioses, and twenty-two Aurelianos (although to be fair, only four of them actually have major roles). There are also 32 biological relatives and 8 spouses stretching across the century this book covers, not to mention characters who aren’t part of the Buendía family. At some point, I felt like I needed to give them numbers to tell them apart.

I didn’t think I was much for the “sweeping family saga” type of book, but if they’re anything like this, I may have to reconsider. I didn’t get particularly attached to any one character (unless you count Remedios the Beauty, who I mainly loved because she’s #goals), but I enjoyed seeing the high-level view of the rise and fall, fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendías. One Hundred Years of Solitude is, much to my surprise, an enjoyable and remarkably relatable book.

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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elizlizabeth's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective slow-paced

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

3.0

This is the story of entire generations of a family, up to the moment they settle in a new land and 'til the bloodline's demise. The Buendía family is definitely something, but I wouldn't say they're a role model (nor does the author portray them as such). Misfortune after misfortune happens to them and it can feel quite fatalist at times, a sort of Colombian Lemony Snicket, but with more incest. There's a lot of characters and the fact that they're named the same had me checking the Family Tree every five pages and even then I'm sure I attributed a plot point to the wrong Aureliano -which I guess is a clever way to force you to immerse in the story and be as lost as all the other Buendías.
In the end that's what this is, a clever book, marvelously crafted with exquisite prose, but deeply disturbing and depressing. I do not agree with GGM's worldview here and the whole Oedipus Complex trope seemed to point at Shakespearean levels of tragedy, but where my man Willy didn't take himself too seriously, GGM does this sad boi act which made me dislike his books in the first place. Appreciate the art, but won't be re-reading it soon, nor recommending it to nobody.

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