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One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Paperback – February 21, 2006
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"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life." —William Kennedy, National Observer
One of the most influential literary works of our time, One Hundred Years of Solitude remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendiá family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women—brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul—this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
- Print length417 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial Modern Classics
- Publication dateFebruary 21, 2006
- Dimensions8.05 x 5.35 x 1.09 inches
- ISBN-100060883286
- Lexile measure1410L
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover comes a novel that explores life after tragedy and the enduring spirit of love. | Learn more
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From the Publisher
Editorial Reviews
Review
“You emerge from this marvelous novel as if from a dream, the mind on fire. . . . With a single bound, Gabriel García Márquez leaps onto the stage with Günter Grass and Vladimir Nabokov, his appetite as enormous as his imagination, his fatalism greater than either. Dazzling.” — John Leonard, New York Times
“One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry that is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life.” — William Kennedy, National Observer
“This extraordinary novel obliterates the family tree in a prose jungle of overwhelming magnificence. . . . You have the sense of living along with the Buendías (and the rest), in them, through them, and in spite of them, in all their loves, madnesses and wars, their allegiances, compromises, dreams and deaths. . . . Like the jungle itself, this novel comes back again and again, fecund, savage and irresistible.” — Paul West, Washington Post
“At 50 years old, García Márquez's masterpiece is as important as ever. . . To experience a towering work like One Hundred Years of Solitude is to be reminded of the humility we should all feel when trying to assert what is true and what is false.” — LitHub
"An irresistible work of storytelling, mixing the magic of the fairy tale, the realistic detail of the domestic novel and the breadth of the family saga.” — New York Times
“No other writer in our time has operated on so vast a scale. None has approached his literary achievement. . . . [García Márquez is] the most important writer of the second half of the twentieth century in any language.” — The Nation
“One Hundred Years of Solitude is substantive and substantial, and its prose precise for the simple reason that its sentences are too exquisite to be inessential. It is a novel on which is bestowed the laurels usually awarded to great works of frugal prose. Yet its genius is in the operatic telling.” — The Independent
“The greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote.” — Pablo Neruda
“One Hundred Years of Solitude offers plenty of reflections on loneliness and the passing of time. It can also be seen as a caustic commentary on the evils of war, or a warm appreciation of familial bonds. García Márquez has urgent things to say that still feel close to home, 50 years after the book was first published.” — The Guardian
“One of the seminal works of 20th century Latin American fiction, it is a classic.” — Variety
“A fabulous creation of magic, and metaphor, and myth. . . . To depict a world so fabulous, so exotic, so extravagant in its comic and tragic effects and yet so palpably real is a magnificent achievement.” — William McPherson, Washington Post
"Unofficially, it’s everybody’s favorite work of world literature and the novel that, more than any other since World War II, has inspired novelists of our time—from Toni Morrison to Salman Rushdie to Junot Díaz. . . . Sexy, entertaining, experimental, politically radical, and wildly popular all at once." — Vanity Fair
“The greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years.” — Salman Rushdie
One of the Landmarks of Modern Literature — New York Public Library
"[This novel] is very special. . . . An expansive legend of a town and family, a political parable, an instrument of rare magic that performs astonishing miracles of transformation. It is a comic masterpiece. It is intelligent. It is slippery with the juice of life." — Newsweek
From the Back Cover
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women -- brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul -- this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
About the Author
Gabriel García Márquez was born in 1927 in the town of Aracataca, Columbia. Latin America's preeminent man of letters, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. García Márquez began his writing career as a journalist and is the author of numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction, including the novels The Autumn of the Patriarch and Love in the Time of Cholera, and the autobiography Living to Tell the Tale. There has been resounding acclaim for his life's work since his death in April 2014.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Gabriel Garcia MarquezHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright ©2006 Gabriel Garcia MarquezAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0060883286
Chapter One
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point. Every year during the month of March a family of ragged gypsies would set up their tents near the village, and with a great uproar of pipes and kettledrums they would display new inventions. First they brought the magnet. A heavy gypsy with an untamed beard and sparrow hands, who introduced himself as Melquíades, put on a bold public demonstration of what he himself called the eighth wonder of the learned alchemists of Macedonia. He went from house to house dragging two metal ingots and everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared from where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind Melquíades' magical irons. "Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls." José Arcadio Buendía, whose unbridled imagination always went beyond the genius of nature and even beyond miracles and magic, thought that it would be possible to make use of that useless invention to extract gold from the bowels of the earth. Melquíades, who was an honest man, warned him: "It won't work for that." But José Arcadio Buendía at that time did not believe in the honesty of gypsies, so he traded his mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots. Úrsula Iguarán, his wife, who relied on those animals to increase their poor domestic holdings, was unable to dissuade him. "Very soon we'll have gold enough and more to pave the floors of the house," her husband replied. For several months he worked hard to demonstrate the truth of his idea. He explored every inch of the region, even the riverbed, dragging the two iron ingots along and reciting Melquíades' incantation aloud. The only thing he succeeded in doing was to unearth a suit of fifteenth-century armor which had all of its pieces soldered together with rust and inside of which there was the hollow resonance of an enormous stone-filled gourd. When José Arcadio Buendía and the four men of his expedition managed to take the armor apart, they found inside a calcified skeleton with a copper locket containing a woman's hair around its neck.
In March the gypsies returned. This time they brought a telescope and a magnifying glass the size of a drum, which they exhibited as the latest discovery of the Jews of Amsterdam. They placed a gypsy woman at one end of the village and set up the telescope at the entrance to the tent. For the price of five reales, people could look into the telescope and see the gypsy woman an arm's length away. "Science has eliminated distance," Melquíades proclaimed. "In a short time, man will be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his own house." A burning noonday sun brought out a startling demonstration with the gigantic magnifying glass: they put a pile of dry hay in the middle of the street and set it on fire by concentrating the sun's rays. José Arcadio Buendía, who had still not been consoled for the failure of his magnets, conceived the idea of using that invention as a weapon of war. Again Melquíades tried to dissuade him, but he finally accepted the two magnetized ingots and three colonial coins in exchange for the magnifying glass. Úrsula wept in consternation. That money was from a chest of gold coins that her father had put together over an entire life of privation and that she had buried underneath her bed in hopes of a proper occasion to make use of it. José Arcadio Buendía made no attempt to console her, completely absorbed in his tactical experiments with the abnegation of a scientist and even at the risk of his own life. In an attempt to show the effects of the glass on enemy troops, he exposed himself to the concentration of the sun's rays and suffered burns which turned into sores that took a long time to heal. Over the protests of his wife, who was alarmed at such a dangerous invention, at one point he was ready to set the house on fire. He would spend hours on end in his room, calculating the strategic possibilities of his novel weapon until he succeeded in putting together a manual of startling instructional clarity and an irresistible power of conviction. He sent it to the government, accompanied by numerous descriptions of his experiments and several pages of explanatory sketches, by a messenger who crossed the mountains, got lost in measureless swamps, forded stormy rivers, and was on the point of perishing under the lash of despair, plague, and wild beasts until he found a route that joined the one used by the mules that carried the mail. In spite of the fact that a trip to the capital was little less than impossible at that time, José Arcadio Buendía promised to undertake it as soon as the government ordered him to so that he could put on some practical demonstrations of his invention for the military authorities and could train them himself in the complicated art of solar war. For several years he waited for an answer. Finally, tired of waiting, he bemoaned to Melquíades the failure of his project ...
Continues...
Excerpted from One Hundred Years of Solitudeby Gabriel Garcia Marquez Copyright ©2006 by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (February 21, 2006)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 417 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0060883286
- Lexile measure : 1410L
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 8.05 x 5.35 x 1.09 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #20 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #41 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #132 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the authors
Gregory Rabassa (born 9 March 1922) is a prominent literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English.
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Customers find the book's humor amusing and whimsical with a fairy-tale effect. They praise the writing style as intense and delightful, with graceful turns of phrase. However, some readers feel the book is frustrating and difficult to read at times. There are mixed opinions on the realism, with some finding it an introduction to magical realism and memorable events, while others consider logic unimportant and the book lacks depth.
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Customers enjoy the humor and surreal elements of the book. They describe it as whimsical, funny, and melancholy. The book is described as imaginative, uplifting, and entertaining.
"...In the world of this story, part real and part fantasy, with the distinction between the two oscillating periodically with random amplitude, ice is..." Read more
"...It was a wonderful, and magically, if you will, introduction to Latin American literature...." Read more
"...This crazy book is challenging, interesting, and funny...." Read more
"...It's inspiring and surreal, whimsical, funny and sad--and it all causes a person to feel very introspective, because it blends so many aspects of..." Read more
Customers have different views on the writing style. Some find it delightful and imaginative, with creative use of words. They appreciate the concise, clear sentences that mark themes clearly. However, others find the book frustrating and difficult to follow, lacking entertainment or profound content.
"In the world of this story, solitude can be shared as well as cherished...." Read more
"...Now some cons about the book were first I had some trouble getting into it and wanting to read it as it starts slow, but it was worth it in the end...." Read more
"...Marquez dazzles the reader with the intensity of his writing; it's as though he had a 1600 page book in him, but is given a 400 page limit...." Read more
"...and surreal, whimsical, funny and sad--and it all causes a person to feel very introspective, because it blends so many aspects of what makes up a..." Read more
Customers have different views on the realism. Some find it an introduction to magical realism with a rich history and bewitching world. They appreciate the detail and imagery, taking the reader on a memorable conscious and unconscious journey. However, others feel that logic is unimportant, leading to fuzzy logic and frustration. The book may not appeal to all readers due to its complexity and buried meaning.
"...In the world of this story, intuition can win over perception, and cognition can sometimes win over intuition, but ice can be made in a hot jungle...." Read more
"...follies, and interactions of the men and women are depicted in memorable events...." Read more
"...between different points in time, fast forwards though time, uses magical realism, makes me as a reader question the intent of his writing, and..." Read more
"...planning to give it four stars, after writing it--I think it's an important enough, and intricately weaved enough, and a unique enough a piece to..." Read more
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 9, 2018In the world of this story, solitude can be shared as well as cherished. It can be something that offers consolation, but it can also be an insufferable burden.
In the world of this story, part real and part fantasy, with the distinction between the two oscillating periodically with random amplitude, ice is a rare jewel, wars are imagined to be fought using magnifying glasses, and the immune system can be almost infinitely resistant to pathogens. Obstinacy and dogmatism become tools for survival and provoke warfare, and keep the imagination at abeyance. Fear is ranked less than curiosity but curiosity can trounce social coherence and shared purpose. Curiosity dominates, beginning at birth, with no concern at all with any wax of Icarus.
In the world of this story, the proliferation and diversity of avian fauna can operate as a directional beacon as well as an acoustic source of madness. Inventions can be in the imagination and as is canonical, can interfere with family life with its predilection to supervise and make rigid its younger members. Fortune telling and other flights of fancy can coexist with scientific and technical innovation with wandering gypsies being the innovators. There is also a slice of post-modernistic nihilism where words have filed for a divorce from their referents.
In the world of this story, loss of memory is a collective infection as is insomnia. There is regularity but also an out-of-equilibrium ethos viz a viz the dance, a consequence of the precision of the metronome and the pianola. Social graces and the rigidity of manners are here also, as well as prudence and other forms of linguistic tools of social manipulation. But fantasies, and the tools used to prove them out, can be destroyed with as much zeal as when they were invented.
In the world of this story, the soil of the land can be tread, even consumed, without taking into account any deity and not even reaching out for its assistance. War is brought about by the usual divisions, the usual ideological spirits, coupled with both religious and anti-religious fever. Fakery and quackery, and charlatans diffuse into the territory with ersatz concepts and inert pills. The cruelty and brutality of leaders meshes well with their political dogmatism.
In the world of this story, the inability to sleep is not because of worry or biting conscience, but rather because of a plague. Passion and sex are not violent but loud, enough to wake the dead, and accomplished in inopportune places. As is typical, those who fight these wars did not know why they were doing so. Genetic purity results in challenges to the status quo, and with characteristic lack of spine exercises violence against the wild beasts who possess it.
In the world of this story, the exhilaration of power (however fictitious is the latter) is countered by other enraptured and exaggerated emotions, leaving power wallowing like a hog in the dung heap of temporary glory. Isolation causes power to decrease exponentially, leaving its victim disoriented and more solitary than ever. Hell then becomes an anti-Sartrian lack of other people.
In the world of this story, family backgrounds, affiliations, names, and characteristics are the result of random perturbations and combinations collecting charge when rubbing together, with consequent repelling when collecting the same sign, and coming together if not. Volatility in outlooks occurs without the stultifying latency of inaction.
In the world of this story, beauty, incredible beauty, unbelievable beauty makes its appearance and instills both typical and atypical reactions, mesmerizing both the weak and strong, but inducing solitude in its bearer. But this beauty is natural, to be distinguished from the ersatz beauty of the those in authority, wrapped as it is typically is in bangles and crepe paper.
In the world of this story, towns and villages can be transformed by inventions as well as doubt, by decadent saboteurs who open their triangles to any willing and paying cylinder. Tolerance as well as xenophobia is clearly manifest with respect to the skin rash of foreign elements who diffuse across boundaries and ergodically mix with the inhabitants, transforming its architecture and forcing them to take on false manners and an excess of tact, prudence, and ethnic tolerance.
In the world of this story, intuition can win over perception, and cognition can sometimes win over intuition, but ice can be made in a hot jungle. Gluttony is celebrated as hospitality. Stomachs can at times have unbounded volume. Frivolous thoughts are sometimes quickly suppressed...
....but descriptions use sentences that run on as effectively and magnificently as the human generations that span this story; this incredible display of literary machinations.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2011I first read "One Hundred Years of Solitude" not long after it was first published in English, almost 40 years ago. It was a wonderful, and magically, if you will, introduction to Latin American literature. Subsequently, I've read several other works by Marquez, notably, Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International) some 20 years later, but none have quite cast the spell of my first "love," this one, so I figured a re-read was in order. The "magic" of magic realism has lost none of its charm.
The story involves six generations of one family, established by Jose Arcadio Buendia and Ursula Iguaran, who also helped found the town of Macondo, in the lowlands of Columbia, though the country is never specifically identified. The in-breeding (and also out-breeding) in this one family is simply astonishing. I can't remember if the original edition had a genealogical chart at the beginning, but this one does, and it provides an invaluable reference in keeping the philanderings, and the subsequent progeny, straight, particularly since numerous individuals over the generations have the same name. What is the "Scarlet Letter" that is prophesized for a family with such a high degree of consanguinity? That a child will be born with a pig's tail.
Marquez dazzles the reader with the intensity of his writing; it's as though he had a 1600 page book in him, but is given a 400 page limit. It is the furious sketching of a street artist, making every line count in a portrait. The strengths, follies, and interactions of the men and women are depicted in memorable events. And there seems to be a realistic balance and development of his characters. Marquez is also the master of segue, from one event to the other, and from one generation to another, with his characters moving from swaddling clothes, on to adulthood, and then into their decrepitude.
From my first reading, I had remembered Rebeca, with her "shameful" addiction to eating dirt. First time around, I chalked it up to Marquez's "magical realism," since no one really ate dirt. Several years later I learned that it is a wide-spread medical problem, often driven by a mineral deficiency that the person is trying to remediate. The author also describes the disease of insomnia which was spread to Macondo, with an accompanying plague of forgetfulness. Magical realism, or the forgetfulness of the "now" generation that has lost the stories of the past?
Establishing the time period comes slowly. Marquez mentions Sir Frances Drake, but he is in the unspecified past. It is only when a family portrait is taken, as a daguerreotype photo, that one realizes it must be in the 1840's-50's, with six generations to go. There are a multitude of themes: since this IS Latin America, Marquez has the obligatory gringos and their banana plantations (alas, all too true); there is endless, senseless war, with the two sides eventually unable to state what they are fighting for, except, of course, the war itself; there are the women who drive men crazy with their beauty, and there is the spitefulness of women to each other (alas, again, the "sisterhood'); there is economic development, and a worker's revolt, and the use of other members of the same class, but in uniform, who repress it; there is the role of the Catholic Church in Latin America, and even a family member who would be Pope and there are unflinching portrayals of the aging process, alas, to the third power.
On the re-read, I noticed a portion of the novel that was much further developed in Innocent Erendira: and Other Stories (Perennial Classics). Also nestled in the book was an important reference: "Taken among them were Jose Arcadio Segundo and Lorenzo Gavilan, a colonel in the Mexican revolution, exiled in Macondo, who said that he had been witness to the heroism of his comrade Artemio Cruz." Checking Marquez bio, he has been a long-time friend of Carlos Fuentes, slipped this reference in 100 years, which is an omen for me, since I was considering re-reading Fuentes marvelous The Death of Artemio Cruz: A Novel (FSG Classics) And in terms of omens, redux even, do future travel plans include meeting another character in the book, the Queen of Madagascar?
I recently had dinner with a woman who had been Ambassador to one of the Latin American countries. Spanish is her native language, and she still reads some of the Latin American writers in Spanish to "keep her language skills up." As for "100 years," she had read it four times, each time in English. It's a record I am unlikely to repeat, but this novel, which honors the Nobel Prize with its name, could use a third read, if I am granted enough time. It ages well, sans decrepitude, and provided much more meaning the second time around. 6-stars.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2024I grew up thinking this book was political. I had a predisposition not to like it. How wrong I was. The Netflix series awaken my curiosity and I bought it. I could not put it down. I completed the book in three days. I researched on line the opinion of other people about certain events in the lives of these personages because I condemn the moral compass of some of them. I abhor most of the things that transpired in these people's lives. Its like human emotions at their lowest: Incest, paedophilia, murder and I think there was zoophilia too..., (yet I kept reading.) I needed to know if everyone agree with the Noble price given and the popularity of this author, I asked because I needed some kind of closure, I needed to acquired some kind of lesson to learn, but I found nothing. People adore this author, but it had left a source taste in my mouth. I'm disgusted with what I've read, but I cannot deny the quality of the book. Yet, I will stay away from this author. They say, Ernest Hemingway and Dostoyevsky were inspirations to him during his live. No wonder I do not like those authors either.
Top reviews from other countries
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Delia Rueda BohórquezReviewed in Spain on January 17, 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars Muy buena calidad y presentación del libro.
Es un regalo para mi hija que ya tiene esta obra en español, cómo en una entrevista Gabriel García Márquez dijo que había quedado muy satisfecho con la versión en inglés, pues me parece excelente obsequio para una lectora bilingüe.
- LijuReviewed in India on January 3, 2025
5.0 out of 5 stars Surreal, elaborate, witty and eccentric!
One needs immense patience and an open mind to spin through the labyrinths of Marquez's universe. But it's all worth the effort, in the end. Enriched for sure!
- PaulinaReviewed in the Netherlands on August 30, 2024
3.0 out of 5 stars was expecting more
the books is a bit difficult for me to focus and i cam really get through it. The plot doesn’t take me in
- SupriyaReviewed in Germany on August 16, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Must read!
This book was amazing!! Highly recommend everyone to read it.
- AlexReviewed in France on July 27, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Arrived fast
Fast and undamaged