I really love reading books, and there're a lot of titles that I like. But my favorite is One Hundred Years of Solitude, written by the colombian journalist and novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez. It was published in 1967, in Buenos Aires. This is probably one of the most important and representative books of South America, and is a best seller around the world; it has sold more than 30 millions of copies since was published.
The book tells the story of the rise and fall of the Buendia family, and a town called Macondo, where they live. There are a lot of characters, and the novel tells the stories of all the members of the clan. I love this book because the way the events are narrated is almost unique. There novel is related to the magic realism, a kind of writing that mix some surrealistic events with everyday acts.
there's a fantastic quote of the book, and is also the last part of the novel:
Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment
when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”
And now, a review of the novel taken from Amazon:
Format:Paperback
The beginning of the book contains a family tree of the Buendia family, and if you're like me you'll surely mangle and dog-ear this page as you work your way though the book, trying to keep track of the Aurelianos, Remedios, and Ursulas.
But the struggle is worth it. This was truly the great novel that Garcia Marquez was meant to write; to me everything of Marquez that followed seems like recycled material. I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude years ago before moving to Latin America. Now that I here and have read it again, many of the messages that before were inaccessible now reveal themselves. The Story of Macondo is the story of Colombia and, to a larger extent, of Latin America. The reviewers tell us this, but it is amazing to see it with my own eyes.
The literal and the fantastic are interwoven with a seamlessness that amazes. One compares his style with Kafka before and Kundera after, literary voice established in this novel has withstood the test of time. It remains unique.
The book is at once funny, sad, tragic; it's history and fantasy. But overall it is a marvelous read. Clearly one of my all time favorites. There are very few books that I recommend as highly as this one. A true classic.
I complete agree with him, specally when he says that this book, in a way of another, is a mirror of the history of South América,.
