One Hundred Years of Solitude — Review

this post was originally published on my Goodreads account.

Another book it took me far to long to actually open and start reading. Also a book where I kept feeling like there was some larger context I was missing, no doubt a result of my sketchy grasp of Latin American history, but this is far from a straight political allegory. It’s history transmuted into the sort of raw narrative power you get from the myth, from the fairy tale, from all the ancient ways of telling you that the world is always going to slip away from your complete understanding. Of course, it’s also frequently funny and frequently sad, and…shit, I can’t figure out how Rushdie did this with Midnight’s Children when he had Marquez as a guide; I sure as hell don’t know how Marquez did it with nothing except maybe some Grimm and maybe some Bullfinch and definitely some oral tradition and obviously his own inspired, monumental genius. In a middle of a century where fiction tended toward the alienating, the individual, the psychological, here’s something that came in and plows you face-first into the history of an entire continent, and refuses to let up until you’re reeling with the force of recurring generations pressed against your eyeballs.