Reviews with content warning for Abortion - Cent'anni Di Solitudine

When I was 15 y.o. - after bein traumatised by the description of an abort in the first part of the narration - I decided I woul never read this book. Here I am, ten years later, after finishing this terribly long book, with the unpleasant sensation that this is gonna be one of the best reading of the year. Let's be clear, I absolutely despise the scene of rape and child abuse that the narrator throws in the stories like nothing. There are too many characters, and after a while I started to hate everyone because the characters I loved were no longer the center of the story. I'm not sure I completely understood all the war part, but I guess it's kinda the point of it. After all it really seemed like a spent a hundred years reading this, but at the end of the day I could not - not - like these characters, only because I saw them from the beginning of their life to their end. I don't give it 5 stars for the reasons I enumerated, but gosh I hate the fact that I liked this book!!!!

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sodafer's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad tense slow-paced

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

3.75

woowowowowow. This was an experience ! uhm. I liked what it had to say about latin america as a latine myself. All of the characters were detailed. I would have rated it 5 stars if it weren't for racist tropes towards characters who weren't the Buendia's as well as that whole end with heavy sexual content that was just disturbing! : D also the way it wrote women was,,,,,, conflicting.

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sofipitch's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective 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

4.5

This is a beautifully written book. It's also very political. It has the same themes of colonialism, political wars, traditional/catholic views vs modern lifestyles, and family that surround a lot of Latin american works. I read "The House of the Spirits" and I can see how Garcia Marquez influenced Allende. The only reason this isn't getting 5 stars is for the depictions of sex, in a lot of scenes the women don't want to and are more or less raped only to "fall in love/have sex all the time" with the man, it happens multiple times and isn't clearly condemned by the text which is, big yikes.

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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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