This book is a delightfull and spell-binding prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He got the Nobel prize for litrature in 1982.
His work is studied across universities accross the globe. His work is termed as magical realism because it is highly original, imaginative, and unprecedented and you find yourself believing the most improbable things as they are described in details.
The most exiting thing about this book is that you can just open any page and enjoy the imagination of the author. The naration seems very un-rehersed and spontaneous. According to the author it took him all his life to write this wonderful book.
In the beginning, we are
introduced to Col. Aureliano Buendia. He goes back to his childhood memory where he faces the firing squad and also the first time he saw ice and thought it was a huge diamond. The author is such a genius. He narrates the event of the characters childhood as if he is about to die, but then the character is himself thinking about the event years later, so there is no question of him dying. This is a smart work by the author. Jose Arcadio Buendia is Col. Areliano's father. He is a larger-than-life man. Areliano's mother,Ursula is a wise, practical and down-to-earth person. The family wanders through the tropical jungles with a little group of friends and find a village miles from anywhere. The name of the village is Macondo. This village is the place for all the other actions to follow in the story. Many new things happen at the village which are not yet been named in the story.
We are later introduced to a central character in the book. He is the gipsy,
Melquiades. Melquiades is very old, and has had face-off with death many times, but he is still alive since his time has not come. He ends up living the last years of his life in the house of the Buendia family. Here he secretly gets involved in a tiny study, and writes a manuscript which no one could understand, so they look "like clothes drying on a washing line". Long after the eventual deaths of the founders of Macondo, one of their descendants discovers that the script is Sanskrit, and devotes half a life-time to translating the parchments of Melquiades.