One Hundred Years Of Solitude

After two long dictionary riddled weeks I finally finished this modern classic by the Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It's a book about a family, the Buendias, that tells their story through several generations and that of the town Macondo that the family founds. There is a lot of tragedy in the family and the same mistakes are made with each generation to give this feeling of history being rather cyclical. Although this sounds like it's going to be a bit miserable to read it's actually very funny. There are many characters in this novel, seven generations worth and the main problem I had was keeping track of who was who; all the men are named some derivative of Jose Arcadio or Aureliano for their fathers/grandfathers/great grandfathers. Luckily the copy I read had a little family tree on one of the early pages so I could have a look at that when I lost my way again! The female characters where my favourite probably because their stories where easier to follow with their diverse names and each of them where very different, whereas the sons in the family all seemed to inherit similar character traits, which again strengthened the whole theme of history repeating. You just have to go along with this book, there's a lot of supernatural bits in it that are just portrayed as run of the mill everyday occurances, like one character Remedios the beauty is folding a sheet one day when she just up and floats off to heaven, as she's too pretty to be confined to Earth. I think it's called magical realism when a book is written like this, so you just have to take it all in, Marquez makes it easy to do this though and the physically impossible things don't stick out or seem that odd which I suppose is odd in itself. This book has been called required reading for the entire human race, the author won the nobel prize for literature, and it's on all of those 'books you must read' lists so should you? Well it's not the easiest read, honestly if I managed to read a page without looking up a dictionary I felt a massive sense of achievement/relief, Marquez really has some vocabulary on him but it was worth the effort. It just takes a LOT of effort but you put that in and it's a very good book, it's a classic that's really actual is a classic, bring a dictionary though. 5 stars.