ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. This is a wonderful masterpiece written by Colombian
author Gabriel García Márquez. In this
novel, the
author manages to mix fantasy with reality, wrapping the
reader up in a magic plot that moves forward in different directions. The novel starts off by telling us about the story of the Buendia family, beginning when the head of the family and his wife, together with some other families from the Caribbean coasts, arrive at Macondo, a magic city located somewhere in the savannah. In this city, we follow the life of several family generations; traveling in the company of gypsies, civil wars, pilots, daguerreotypes and yellow flowers, the reader gets easily involved in the highly entertaining and far-fetched adventures of each one of the characters. We must remark that this is no ordinary book, the author’s skill at depicting each of the characters in turn, focusing on each one at a time, turning him into the main character, capturing the reader’s main interest, all reflect his great mastery. At the beginning we are lead to think that the novel is about the adventures of José Arcadio, his wife Úrsula and their two sons, but we are mistaken, since every twenty pages or so, we are confronted with another descendant ready to take over and become, in turn, the main character. This well-known novel reflects, according to the author, the experiences he witnessed as a child. Passages such as those of the Civil War and the killing of the multinational United Fruit workers are all part of Colombian history and in this book we are given the chance of reading about these incidents which García Márquez presents in a context of rich visual images such as those of iron nails being pulled out of houses or priests that levitate after drinking a cup of hot chocolate.