One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez
This was my first foray in Garcia-Marquez's work. He is known most widely for his work in the genre of magical realism, which treats supernatural events as everyday occurrences. Magical realism abounds in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where many unusual events occur - children are born with the tails of pigs, a woman folding laundry one day ascends to heaven, an orphaned girl compulsively eats the whitewash off of walls, and a man spends his life swarmed by yellow butterflies.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, set in Colombia, follows six generations of the Buendia family, documenting their lives, loves, wars, and deaths. In the first generation, Jose Arcadio Buendia, a headstrong inventor, marries Ursula Iguaran and this couple eventually founds the town of Macondo, where the rest of the story takes place. Their two sons, Jose Arcadio and Aureliano, both grow up to become figures of mythic proportions. Every year, troops of itinerant gypsies come to Macondo, showcasing their miraculous wares. Jose Arcadio Buendia becomes obsessed with one of the gypsies, Melquiades. After his death, Melquiades returns to Macondo (yes, magical realism) and writes scrolls and scrolls of mysterious parchments in an indecipherable language, before dying a second time. A recurring plotline concerns these scrolls and the various Buendias' attempts to translate them. Our author also shows up in the book, in the minor role of Colonel Gerineldo Marquez, and is one of the few to permanently leave Macondo in the end.
One of the most common complaints I've heard about the book is that the Buendia characters' names are too similar to each other and it's easy to get them confused. But I believe this was partially Garcia-Marquez's intent. Throughout, we see sons and grandsons struggling in love and war, ultimately getting themselves into the same situations as their ancestors. One of the major themes of the book is that history repeats itself and that every man, no matter how happy, lives in his own kind of solitude. For me, it was a brilliant read.
