Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Work: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Translated from Spanish by: Gregory Rabassa
Edition:
Penguin Books, 2007
 |
| My copy of the book. |
I started the first chapter in January
this year. I had every intention to finish it in a month. Having majored in
literature throughout my academic career it seemed to be an amble time to give
myself.
However, six months later, just after
midnight on July 6 2013, I closed the final chapter.
The only excuse I can offer for taking
so long is the way it made me feel, the way I didn't really want to let it go -
there was so much to take in and learn from the story and the author. Sometimes
I'd start a few chapters back because I needed to re-affirm in my mind the
complicated plot and re-identify the many Aurelianos and José Arcadios.
It's rare to be so moved by a novel as I
was by One Hundred Years of Solitude. It's an epic novel that despite its
surrealism touches upon sociological realism of how industrialisation and
colonialism even found a way to the most remote corner of the world; how the
wheels of time never stop turning no matter how much we desire to freeze time
and bring back a simpler past.
The characters, their interactions and
eventual fate may seem strange in the eyes of the modern reader -sometimes even
crude. The threads of mysticism, isolation, religion, love, hate, passion and
honour weave together the plot and the epic story. For the reader, the cobweb that
is the novel, creates a sense of urgency to keep reading, yet simultaneously to momentarily stop, and read again the same pages to take in the beautiful
storytelling and to simply contemplate.
After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, it's easy to understand why
critics have been so generous of flattery in their reviews since its first
publication in 1967.
A masterpiece
it is, and life is simply more beautiful after the reading.
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