Product Description

‘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.’ Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where José Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Úrsula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía’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 Buendía 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 García Márquez's most celebrated novel is published to coincide with celebrations to mark the 80th birthday of this Nobel Prize winning author in 2007.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1495 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
Should be required reading for the entire human race (New York Times )

The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years (Salman Rushdie )

No lover of fiction can fail to respond to the grace of Márquez's writing (Sunday Telegraph )

It's so much fun to read, unexpected and beautiful (Darryl Hannah )

The book that sort of saved my life (Emma Thompson )

It's the most magical book I have ever read... I think [Márquez] has influenced the world (Caroline Herrera )

About the Author
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927- ) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. His most recent book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is his first new novel to be published in a decade and is available in paperback from Penguin from August 2007. He is the author of several novels and collections of short stories, including Leaf Storm (1955); One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967); The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975); Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

Customer Reviews

A Looking Glass Trip Through History
This is not your typical novel. It's difficult, confusing, strongly metaphorical, and far more concerned with history and message than any deep look at its characters. At the same time, it is sometimes lyrical, beautiful, inventive, and given to unexpected trips to the magical, just when it seems bogged down in a very harsh reality.

It's the story of the town of Macondo and the family that help found the town, stretched over the hundred years of the title. It's clear, when you step back from the details of this work, that the entire work is a metaphor for what happened to Columbia, from its early run-in with the Spanish invaders through the exploitive actions of companies out to rip the riches from the country with no regard for the human cost of their endeavors, and on into to the modern day world of political corruption backed by barely sheathed threats of force.

The family that the book follows is unique in many ways, peopled by characters both incredibly strong and driven by obsessions, and yet insular, separated from the real world by their own internal fantasies. Here we find the rebel hero and the dominating matron side by side with ghosts, the Wandering Jew, and highly mysterious gypsies. However, all of these characters are seen from a distance, even though we are privy to their internal thoughts and ideas, and it is difficult to get emotionally involved with any of them. Not helping in this regard is the extreme similarity of names through various generations of the family, and frequent references to the genealogical chart at the beginning of the book are necessary to try and keep everything straight.

Stylistically, be prepared for page long sentences and sudden multi-page discourses not immediately connected to current happenings. Often this prose is quite beautiful, and at times very effective in painting pictures of some very horrible occurrences in ways that can sear into your brain. Also be fully prepared for the flights of magical realism, when you go from the mundane of everyday to things clearly impossible in ordinary life, items which often highlight by contrast the depth and trivialness of the ordinary.

If you are looking for a straightforward story with normal people, this is not the place to look. If instead you are looking for something very much out of the ordinary, and willing to work to find the core of what's happening, this work can be quite rewarding. It's doubtful if a single reading of this work will expose all of its potential, there is too much buried meaning, symbolism, and metaphor here that needs careful inspection to yield its full treasure. Its themes are not uplifting; futility, the constant of man's inhumanity to others is stark, the repetitiveness of the actions and character types from one generation to the next leads one down the path of asking what purpose does anything have, and the pervasiveness of each individual's necessary isolation from others keeps a dark cloud over the entire work. This is a somber work, with its gold carefully buried, and the reader must be a diligent prospector.

---Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

An acquired taste
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel but I can see why some people wouldn't like it as it is often meandering and occasionally pretentious. However, I'm sure that if you're a fan of Magic Realism you will love it.

Macondo is a mythical South American town, founded, almost by accident, by Jose Arcadio Buendia, and populated primarily by his descendants. This is the story of one hundred years in the life of Macondo and its inhabitants - the story of the town's birth, development and death. Civil war and natural calamities plague this vital place whose populace fights to renew itself and survive. This is a huge narrative fiction that explores the history of a people caught up in the history of a place. And Marquez captures the range of human emotions and the reasons for experiencing them in this generational tale.

As a fan of Japanese Magic Realism master Haruki Murakami, I was naturally drawn to Marquez's slightly surreal and nebulous prose. His use of language and his ability to weave an intricate yet accessible story is superb, and this is a captivating read from start to finish.

Spellbinding
To say that the fantastic tale of the Buendías of Macondo is a profound examination of human behaviour, flaws and experience is more than a little pedestrian, but, then again, besides Gabriel García Márquez much is pedestrian.

As these behaviours, flaws and experiences are too much to fit into one lifetime, we find characters replayed through generations, and lifespans extended well beyond the norm. The overriding sense is one of benign curiosity about it all; events are observed through detached but not unsmiling eyes. There are many Aurelianos and José Arcadios, for example, and the women may well exceed a hundred years in age. Their lives are played out in a magical world defined by religion and superstition as much as by reality. It may rain for four years; there are thirty-two civil wars; visiting girls need more than seventy chamber pots; a young woman ascends to heaven; and red ants continually threaten foundations, as if they are entropy made visible. It is all disturbingly lit, as if conjured up in a delirium. But it is also a warning.

In all this, Márquez scrupulously avoids the sentimental. There is no tugging at the heartstrings; he simply sets out what happens. Ageing is ageing, dispassionately described; madness is madness, people go mad. And he has a twinkle in his eye, too: death is death, but any thoughts of maudlin sentimentality are banished by farce.

The confusion of characters with similar names is deliberate, because the more the history of the Buendías unfolds, the more it resembles what has already passed. It is almost fractal. It was repeating before we were born and it will repeat when we are gone, we are led to believe. We expect that as we approach the end there will be more Aurelianos and José Arcadios, spinning off into a future where there will still be hubris, idiocy, infidelity and intransigence. Should we stop taking it all so seriously, and surrender to the absurdity of it all, because it will repeat itself no matter what?

Then there is born what Márquez describes as the first child in a hundred years to be engendered with love. But he is born of an incestuous relationship. His father wishes him to be called Aureliano, though by this time the red ants have seen to it that it scarcely matters. The last in the line of that name has already lost his friends and his lover, and, as the spellbinding final pages tighten their grip, he finds he can at last decipher the parchment of a gypsy called Melquíades. As the walls of the city of mirrors collapse around him, we learn that everything that has been written is not, in fact, repeatable. Márquez the magician looks us squarely in the eyes. The twinkle has gone. Beware of sealing yourself off from others, he says; withdrawal will warp you. When the winds blow there will be no-one. You will have no second opportunity.