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A review by yuvraj
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
5.0
this was one of my main goals of 2023, its been sitting on my shelf for over a year and I told myself this year I have to finish it
Its a fantastic contemporary classic - Marquez invented the concept of ‘magical realism’ in this book.
Its so brilliantly written that the most unexpected ideas - people turning into butterflies, floating into the heavens, living for centuries, breathing under water - you read them, and there is no second guessing, its just, oh yeah ofcourse that can happen.
This writing is incredibly unique. No author I have ever read can write like this, each sentence is so delicious to read - only Vladimir Nabokov comes close. He won the Nobel prize for literature so it makes sense.
It really tried to express three main ideas
- War is always undesirable - it always morphs into the very thing it sought to end
- Time is a cycle, history really and truly does repeat itself - even if the repetition is comically exaggerated here
- Post-colonialism - this could be argued as one of the first ever post colonial novels - it shows the city of Macondo (a fictional place in modern South America) and its inhabitants and their descendants as South America meets the white man. Ive studied post colonialism heavily this past semester, and South America is definetly the least read, primarily because colonialism there happened ages ago relatively to Africa and Asia, but I think we then miss out on incredible stories and ideas when we ignore it
- Overall - if you are looking for a truly challenging, entertaining and just stunning novel look no further
Its a fantastic contemporary classic - Marquez invented the concept of ‘magical realism’ in this book.
Its so brilliantly written that the most unexpected ideas - people turning into butterflies, floating into the heavens, living for centuries, breathing under water - you read them, and there is no second guessing, its just, oh yeah ofcourse that can happen.
This writing is incredibly unique. No author I have ever read can write like this, each sentence is so delicious to read - only Vladimir Nabokov comes close. He won the Nobel prize for literature so it makes sense.
It really tried to express three main ideas
- War is always undesirable - it always morphs into the very thing it sought to end
- Time is a cycle, history really and truly does repeat itself - even if the repetition is comically exaggerated here
- Post-colonialism - this could be argued as one of the first ever post colonial novels - it shows the city of Macondo (a fictional place in modern South America) and its inhabitants and their descendants as South America meets the white man. Ive studied post colonialism heavily this past semester, and South America is definetly the least read, primarily because colonialism there happened ages ago relatively to Africa and Asia, but I think we then miss out on incredible stories and ideas when we ignore it
- Overall - if you are looking for a truly challenging, entertaining and just stunning novel look no further