One Hundred Years of Solitude is an absolutely innovative book; she's smart, creative, and full of powerful anecdotal wisdom. Gabriel García Márquez plays with reality itself; he plays with the limitations of fiction; he uses elements of magic, of fantasy, to give voice to things that could never be said as effectively in ordinary terms: he breaks through realism and establishes his own original style. A strange, poetic, whimsical history of the city of Macondo, lost somewhere in the jungle - from creation to decline.
The story of the Buendia family - a family in which miracles are so everyday that they don’t even pay attention to them. The Buendia clan produces saints and sinners, revolutionaries, heroes and traitors, dashing adventurers - and women too beautiful for ordinary life. Extraordinary passions boil within him - and incredible events occur.
However, these incredible events again and again become a kind of “magic mirror” through which the true history of Latin America appears to the reader...
He did nothing less than launch a new mode of literary appeal: magical realism. Marquez was not the first writer to do this, but his works were the first to attract the attention of critics, which, in essence, allowed the style to be defined and recognized. The book's most powerful element is its inherent pessimism, with its sad realization that history can (and will) repeat itself. All good intentions fail, and indeed, One Hundred Years of Solitude challenges the progress (or lack thereof) of society. It creates a self-contained story within its own isolated confines that perhaps reflects the nature of humanity. No matter how much we want to change the world (or how much we believe in revolution or a new political ideal), those good intentions often become distorted when confronted with the horrors of war and bloodshed. Nothing really changes.
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Translation: Nina Butyrina, Valery Stolbov
Pages: 416 (offset). Hardcover+dust jacket
Dimensions: 208x135x25 mm
Series: Library of Classics
