Profile
- name: Bookworm
recently...
Poll
If you think reading is "nerdy", "uncool", or "not fun".... then you don't know what you're missing out on! In this corner we'll be exploring the beautiful world of the written word, and namely, books. Got some thoughts, recommendations, or reviews to share? Email them to book.corner@gmail.com.
01 October, 2006
One Hundred Years of Solitude
By Gabriel Garcia Marcez
You might think that reading about the life of an isolated town somewhere in Latin America through the history of three generations of a family living there would be…well, less than interesting for the contemporary reader… but start reading this book, and think again!! It takes only a few pages to get you intrigued and simply hooked to this fascinating novel that takes you into the life of the Buendia family in the mythical town of Macondo, and with it into greater depths of human emotions, complexity, simplicity, compassion, despair, stubbornness, beauty, and most of all – passion. It's a book where a lot happens, and what happens will move you.
As put by the Oprah book club, "One Hundred Years of Solitude will inspire you to connect with your family, love more deeply, and dream bigger and find deeper truths within yourself."
About the Author
Known throughout Latin America, with great fondness, as "Gabo", Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in March of 1927 in the tiny Colombian banana town of Aracataca. At the age of 19, despite a passion to be a writer, García Márquez enrolled in the law program at the Universidad Nacional in Bogotá, respecting his parents' desire for him to be "practical." Yet instead of focusing on his law classes, he started exploring literature through the works of Franz Kafka, William Faulkner (the most widely translated American writer of his generation,) Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf – and he began writing. García Márquez transitioned to journalism after leaving school. In the course of five years he covered stories in Rome, Geneva, Poland, Hungary, Paris, Venezuela, Havana and New York City. After a three-year writers' block that lasted until the beginning of 1965, the personal novel he'd always hoped to write came pouring out of García Márquez. Within a week of the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, all 8000 copies of the original printing had been sold. His novels since, both magical and legendary, have kept him at the forefront of literature since 1970: The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in His Labyrinth and Of Love and Other Demons.
He continues to write ferocious books with wide appeal. One thing we can promise about García Márquez' books: you won't be bored. Just this year, he's garnered vast praise since publishing his aptly named autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale. Like his fiction, it has won the hearts of readers everywhere.From Jose Arcadio Buendia (the founder of Macondo), and his wife Ursula - the matriarch who outlives most of her great grand children and who is the binding factor between the later generations and the ghosts of the past – down to the last Aureliano, going through generations of intriguing, fascinating men and women, the characters are a real treat. This book is so alive, so honest, and tells the truth about humanity in all its ways. Even though things that might be by our definition "supernatural" happen in this book all the time, to Marquez they are normal incidents in the lives of his brilliant characters. The Buedias are probably the most human characters you will ever encounter in literature.
When this book was first published in 1967, it took the world by storm. It introduced Latin American literature to the world and has since been translated into more than 36 languages. It won the Chianchiano Prize in Italy, the Best Foreign Book in France, the Rómulo Gallegos Prize and ultimately the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A service provided by Al Bawaba