For book eighteen, I was given the choice between:
‘The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet’ by Becky Chambers
‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
‘The Bone Clocks’ by David Mitchell
With a classic sitting in the middle of two more modern choices, I finally decided to take the dive and check out the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Goodreads summary: The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel that tells the story of the Buendia family, and chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love—in rich, imaginative prose that has come to define an entire genre known as “magical realism.”
Have you ever wanted to enjoy a book so much that you almost manage to fool yourself into believing it is better than it actually is? Gabriel Garcia Marquez is an author who has been lauded for many years and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is one of his supposed classics. As always with a book like this, my lack of enjoyment is not due to Marquez’s writing ability – he wouldn’t have needed me to tell him that he can write. It is instead that the plot itself, what should be driving me forward in an engaged reverie, which felt all too much like a confusing slog for the majority of the novel’s length.
To what extent Marquez meant for it to be confusing is up for debate. With the narrative telling the story of the Buendia family over the course of several generations, and with a central thematic idea of history repeating itself, the decision to name many of the characters the same name is clearly designed to disorient the reader. One character bleeds into that of his uncle or her mother; characters share similar infatuations and foibles as those that came before. However, just because something is designed to be in a particular way, it doesn’t make it good.
The confusion surrounding the names often meant that the events that occurred to each character rang hollow for me. Someone got married, someone else had a lot of sex, another character flew off into the sky and never came back. Nearly all of the set pieces that were designed to highlight the eccentricities of the family (alongside what I’m fairly sure was multiple incestual relationships, unless I completely misread it) just washed over me and nothing felt like it stuck. Even now, a week or so removed from finishing the book, I struggle to genuinely remember what happened to who.
Where ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ is at its best is during some of the darkly comic moments that exist across the narrative. Unfortunately, Marquez often overdoes these humorous scenarios to the point where they become too farcical to be enjoyable. I know that the style is ‘magic realism’ and there is always going to be an element of the weird and wonderful, but all too often it felt like something strange happened for the sake of it.
There was a time when I think ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ might have appealed to me more, the more experimental nature perhaps fitting in better with a younger me when I desired to challenge my reading ability as much as enjoying a good book. Also, I can see why people like this book. If you can get past the confusion and buy in to the Buendia family’s story, the writing itself is beautiful in its evocative nature. However, it just wasn’t for me, no matter how much I might have wished it was.
Scaling the TBR Pile 