Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5432 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Synopsis
'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.' Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where Jose Arcadio Buendia and his strong-willed wife, Ursula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquiades excites Aureliano Buendia's father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands. Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, hauntings and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Buendia household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds...This new edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most celebrated novel is published to coincide with celebrations to mark the 80th birthday of this Nobel Prize winning author in 2007.

Customer Reviews

I agree with bloodsimple....
I have really tried with this book, yes its surpose to be a masterpeice and was recently voted in the top 100 best literary fict books, but what is the story? Where's the plot??? I have never ever ever given up on a book,but this is a first. Love in the time of cholorea YES this one NO! Frankly I'm being generous giving it two stars.

Is there anybody out there? The search for realism
I needed to find someone who didn't think this book was 'the best book in any language of the last fifty years', whose life was not saved by it, and who does not consider it a work of sheer genius, and thank heaven i found some (some of the other reveiwers here).
I'm still readin it, trying not to give up, but i feel like the events are being described to me by someone who is watching it while i sit there removed from the action. There are very few lines of actual dialogue and little sense of the moments the people go through despite some exquisite descriptions. I know, that should be a contradictory statement but there we are. Fantastic and imaginative are not the same as interesting or captivating and whilst it might turn out to be a book i smply cant help reading, so far i feel like i'm soldiering on.
Perhaps the people who think this is an imaginative work of genius have spent a lot of time with people with no imaginations, thus making this gentleman appear as the god they declare him to be.
probably would have enjoyed it more thus far without such bizzarly over the top praise.

One of the best books I have ever read!
Marquez has a unique gift for storytelling. The opening line to One Hundred Years of Solitude "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" sets the tone, and launches you into a sprawling tale that spans a hundred years of the Buendia family, and the founding of the town of Macondo.

But this book is much more than an exercise in genealogy. It's a spectral exploration of human emotions, from the deepest depths of despair to the outermost reaches of happiness, all intertwined in the imagination of a literary genius.

Marquez is a legend in Columbia, and rightly so. His Nobel Prize for literature is just reward for one of the greatest authors of the 20th century. It's a pity the two previous reviewers didn't enjoy the book. They are in a very, very small minority.