From the moment Melquiades the gipsy walks into the jungle settlement of Macondo nothing is ever the same again. An appealing serpent, he brings knowledge and the tools of discovery to this protected Eden. With them the patriarch, Jose Arcadio Buendia, painstakingly reinvents man's seminal discoveries. The only time his wife, Ursula, loses patience with him is when he rediscovers that the world is round like an orange! This phantasmagorical novel is a modern parable told without moralizing; it's genius lies not only in making us laugh at the human predicament, but in making us laugh in sympathy.
*** [MANY YEARS LATER, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice] ***(Penguin Books, 3 September 1998, first published 5 June 1967, paperback, 422 pages, bought from a charity shop, Popsugar 2018 Reading Challenge, a book mentioned in another book)
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I chose this book from this website. It was mentioned in An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine. Judging from Good Reads this book has a lot of fans. I'm not one of them. I didn't get on with it at all. Maybe magic realism (whatever that is) isn't my thing? I struggled to read this book and have never been so relived to finish something in my life. The book is weird and not in a good way. I found it a slog to get through. Seventeen people all with the same name? Seriously? What's that shit about? There are a lot of characters and you don't spend enough time with any of them to care about them. I really liked the first chapter and thought I was in for a treat. But things went downhill. I'm sorry but this book is just so dull it hurts my brain. I don't get why this book is so lauded. Are people afraid of not looking cool in front of their super-intelligent English Literature friends? I have no such qualms. This book is boring and pretentious. A lot of interesting things happen I'm not disputing that but they're told in such a detached way I didn't care about anyone in the book. There are much better books to read. I've not read the author before and if One Hundred Years of Solitude is an example of his style I'll steer well clear.
