Book Reviews - Review 44

Few people who've read One Hundred Years of Solitude seem to dispute that it's one of the great novels of the Twentieth Century, and I wouldn't deviate from that consensus. It tells the story of several generations of the Buendías family, who inhabit a town in an unspecified South American country that is no doubt largely modelled on Colombia.

I interpreted this novel as a broad allegory of the development of human civilisation - which isn't to say that the events described, many of them supernatural, are intended as corollaries of real historical events; rather, I think, they suggest human consciousness in its various stages of development, from wonder, through prosperity and suffering, to final resignation. Each generation of the Buendías family makes the same mistakes as its predecessors - and this is an accurate reflection of real human behaviour, I think; it's not that the characters lack wisdom, but rather that they have no control over their compulsions, and no real sense of how to move forward.

Although this is one of my all-time favourite novels, I wouldn't exactly call it a page-turner. This is partly because most of the characters have very similar names - a deliberate method used by García Márquez to emphasise their inability to escape their genetic heritage. This means one has to refer frequently to the family tree that is helpfully provided at the front of the book (Penguin edition) - which slows down the reading process somewhat.

But this is most definitely a book that stays with you. It's essentially a poetic novel, whose meaning is absorbed rather than apprehended intellectually. The "magic" of it isn't simply in the strange, often unexplicable events it describes, but also in the transforming effect it has on the reader's mind.

Does that sound a bit pretentious? Please yerself. Anyway, read this book - you won't regret it.