Cien Años de Solded (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

This is not a book. This is *the* book. It is no wonder that it won Garcia Marquez a Nobel Price, though the price was formally for all of his stories and novels, I doubt that it would have been given to him without cien años. Since the book is so celebrated it is hard to say anything that has not been said before, so I'll keep this posting short.

The plot and story line are well thought out and set up and the execution is simply brilliant. Having grown up in South America, I can safely say that the book does give a lot of insight about the peculiarities of Latin American culture -- to me some parts might have as well been taking place not in Macondo, but in some small town in Bolivia such as Punata or Cliza.

This is my second time reading the book, though the first one was for a literature class assignment in high school and all I remember from that was that I really disliked the book. What I disliked back then was all the dark realism that is included -- incest, cold-blooded-killing, treason, etcetera which can be summed up as small-town drama. However, now, perhaps with a more mature view, I realize that not only is that probably actually very real, but it allows the story to paint a very emotional and powerful portrayal of Macondo.

My favorite feature this time around was paying attention to all the patriarchy in the story while realizing that most of it is told from the perspective of Ursula (the oldest female character). A couple of people have argued that it is not accurate to say that the story is told from the perspective of Ursula and they may be right; however, my reasons for believing are as folllows:
- she is present from the very beginning until almost the very end
- every time a character is near her (ie living at the Buendia residence) we know great detail about what is happening with them, but not so when they are far away
- she is the wisest of them all -- she always knows the cure, she is always right. Now, all the other characters are portrayed as having many deep flaws (which makes them real), but Ursula has very few, as if the person telling the story was not aware of her deeper flaws, but aware of everyone else's

Finally, I highly recommend reading this in Spanish if you can. It seems to me that some of the cultural delicacies would be extremely difficult if not impossible to capture in English. However, Zack has pointed out that the translation by WinninghamGregory Rabassa is very good as the translator is also a very good writer.