Book Review: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It took me a while to settle into the style and feel, but ultimately reading One Hundred Years of Solitude was a surreal experience. The town of Macondo and its inhabitants are hidden away from time. Everything that happened here could have happened in a year or a hundred years or a thousand years. The only way to you have of telling is the changing generations, the births, deaths and marriages, and even that isn’t always a reliable indicator. This feeling of time being suspended was enjoyable once you accepted it, and it felt like the book could go on forever because of it.
When I realised that the names were going to be repeated I thought I was going to have a problem keeping straight who was who. It was written in such a way that whenever you started to wonder if you had confused one Aureliano with another there would be a reminder, by referring back to some previous event that happened to remind you which branch of the family tree was under discussion.

The was no real overarching plot to the story. It wasn’t written in the expected three act format following the hero’s journey. It was rather just a sequence of events that happened, occasionally jumping around in time to add further information or fill in some gaps. This added to the warped sense of time throughout the novel. It wasn’t a linear start to finish, time felt stretched and pulled out in places, other times it was all bunched up and looped back on itself.

I’ve been waiting a long time to read anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I really enjoy the magical realism genre, but I’d never got around to reading anything by him. I’m glad I did, it wasn’t what I expected, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. I look forward to reading the rest of his works.
4 out of 5 stars.

 One Hundred Years of Solitude meets criteria thirteen for the 2018 Read Harder Challenge.
Have you read One Hundred Years of Solitude? Did you enjoy it? Let me know in the comments below!

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