One Hundred Years of Solitude

I love being taken to places I’ve never been before and being exposed to leaps in imagination. Marquez, the most famous of the school of magical realism, takes the reader on a journey through time and history in an unforgettable tale. The style of writing captures me in this book and has also influenced me. If you read no other book, read this one.

Not long after reading Sometimes A Great Notion, I found myself in El Salvador on assignment. A colleague gave me a dogeared copy of this book. For the second time, a book, a novel, or a story imagined in an author’s soul and brain blew my mind. Blew it this time to smithereens.

All these years later, I still haven’t fully recovered. Every page, practically every sentence, is filled with miracles. Miracles of invention. Miracles of inspiration. Miracles of the human heart. Several readings are in, and I still marvel at the audacity of the thing and wonder just how… show more.

I read this Nobel laureate’s book when I was a boy, some years before I started writing. Reading fiction has always been as much of an escape from sometimes-difficult circumstances as it has been simple entertainment. Writing fiction is that and more.

The magical quality of even the translated versions of this classic novel transported me to the author’s world. Even now, I can readily conjure the scene where the inhabitants of a town, including dogs, stand silently in a square, waiting for a puff of wind to drop flowers from a tree as if they were raindrops.

There was… show more.

I adore this novel because it develops from the past to the present and future of the Buendìa family, although the past represents itself in the present and will represent itself in the future.

Generations change, but their stories remain the same in an endless loop. This timeless repetition of the same or similar misfortunes is interrupted by real historical and imaginary events that further distort the linear cause-and-effect chain.  

This novel is impossible. Names, plots, generations, and vivid words all created hurdles for me to finish it. I honestly wanted to give up, but I always came back to the book.

The hurdles cast a spell that demanded me to continue. I wanted to know what happened to Macondo, the fictional town in the book. The magic elements and scents of the words left me spellbound for years. The reading experience elevated me to a colorful world, and I almost did not want to return to my reality.

I fell in love with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book because it stirred my imagination like no other.

The blend of magical realism opened a new perspective for me, weaving a century-long family saga that made me question my own reality and roots. The narrative captivated me, pushing me to delve into the complexities of its characters with each read.

This book isn't just a read for me but an emotional journey that continues to leave a lasting impact on me.

I was in the Peace Corps in Colombia when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, and fell in love with this kind of fiction (which we now call magical realism).

It is set in a poor village where magical things happen, and no one gives it a second thought. There is also a political story that reflects historical events in Colombia and in other parts of Latin America.

The author won the Nobel Prize in 1982, and no writer can be more highly acclaimed than that. Oprah chose it for her book club (well, that’s pretty high acclaim, too),… show more.

The fantastical world of Macondo in a fictionalized Colombia enthralled me when I first read the book back in high school; it was my first encounter with magical realism.

The Buendía family saga is filled with eccentric characters and unpredictable story arcs—from the respected patriarch who ends up tied to a tree in the backyard shouting in Latin during the last years of his life to the baby Aureliano who, seven generations later, is born with the tail of a pig—no one can tell what will happen next.

The effortless worldbuilding and the way García Márquez’s characters are willing to… show more.

The literary equivalent of smoking peyote: intuitive, enchanting, dreamlike, revelatory, with everything larger than life. An exploration of people’s hearts, souls, and sins. That is, their solitudes.

The family tree at the front was a lifesaver for me because of the recurrent names used across the generations. But the patterns across time are important thematically, just as patterns of color are required for explosive kaleidoscopic visions.

His masterpiece and, in my opinion, the best novel of the 20th century. Yes, keeping track of all the names is a chore, but the magical realism will whisk you away and envelop you. How can you go wrong with a novel whose opening line is: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."