Gail--and any others who enjoyed 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

[PrairieAir]

Could you tell me what you liked about this book? I kept reading it because it came highly recommended and I'd seen and heard a lot of talk about Love in the Time of Cholera by the same author. Plus, I kept thinking about how I'd almost given up on East of Eden while reading those nasty descriptions and deeds of Cathy Trask, only to find that it is now my favorite book. I kept waiting for 100 Years to get better, kept looking for meaning, for some redeeming quality to it. It just wasn't there for me. I said the same thing after reading The Winter of Our Discontent, but someone here gave me their take and I re-evaluated the book and found I really do like it. (And later experiences gave me even more appreciation for that one.) I re-read The Catcher in the Rye after the same sort of conversation herre, but found it only slightly more bearable.:D

 

I'd love to hear why you liked this book so much. Is it the author's style (which may have lost something in translation)? The themes? Some lesson learned? All I found in it was a cycle of incest with a little p@d@philia and magic thrown in. And those repeating names! Good Lord! It was difficult keeping the characters straight with all the name repetition.

[Heather in the Kootenays]

I had the same problem with 100 Years. I struggled through it but didn't get it.

 

I look forward to the responses you get.

[kalanamak]

I am not a fan of South American surrealists, but this is the only book of the bunch I liked. I read it aloud with a "reading buddy" and it was his pick, not mine. We took turns.

 

I loved Ursula. I think the "climax" of the book is when she finally "loses it" and rants for one whole solid page. It was my turn to read when we got to that spot and I was breathless by the end of her rant, it was so apropos.

 

The book gets sad and lost at the end, but it that is what happened to the family. There was a "big" family in the town I grew up in. They had the only big brick hotel downtown (right next to the old city hall) and the first movie theater in town. They have the only mausoleum in the town's cemetery, but then the family petered out and times changed etc.

 

This book always made me think of them. A friend of my brothers was the night clerk at the hotel when the last of the grandkids was ancient and the place was a flophouse. He found a room in the attic with a hole in the roof and moved everything out. In the process he found a huge stash of letters written by one of the relatives who was a field surgeon in the Civil War. Just an idea of the timeframe of this family.

 

Anyhooo. I thought much of 100 funny, and that, though long, read quickly (we read it in long chunks) but that it is easy to skim too much if reading silently. It is a long slow meander down a river of oddness in a time of great change, about how the big and the important fail and fade, and others slog on....

 

(see just the thought of the book makes me write in a vague and meandering way)

[PrairieAir]

I loved Ursula. I think the "climax" of the book is when she finally "loses it" and rants for one whole solid page. It was my turn to read when we got to that spot and I was breathless by the end of her rant, it was so apropos.

 

 

I did like Ursula. She was such a strong character and she hung on for so long.

 

I think I'd rather read a story about this family you know, though:D

[SFP]

May I recommend Anne Tyler's Searching for Caleb to you, Jenni? It spans 100 years in the Peck family of Baltimore and I have my suspicions, based first and foremost on Tyler once being spotted at the beach wearing a One Hundred Years of Solitude tee shirt, that she had Garcia Marquez in mind when she wrote it.

 

Caleb is one of my all-time favorites and one of these years I'm going to read it back-to-back with One Hundred Years so that I can see if my suspicions bear out.

[Ashleen]

I have heard so much about 100 Years of Solitude that I opened it last year. And it started with a firing squad. And I flashed back to college, when I minored in Spanish and had to take Latin American history classes and watch several brutal films involving firing squads and worse. For me, any book that starts that way is something I know I can't do. My Latin American history class had me traumatized for pretty much the entire semester. There are parts of Rigoberta Menchu's memoir that still haunt me to this day.

[GailV]

It is a long slow meander down a river of oddness in a time of great change, about how the big and the important fail and fade, and others slog on....

 

Oh, that's just a lovely summary of it!

 

 

(see just the thought of the book makes me write in a vague and meandering way)

 

And maybe that's why I liked your review? Because I like vague and meandering prose? Actually I don't typically like meandering prose, and I don't even read that much fiction. I tend to be very matter-of-fact. But for some reason I just adore South American surrealists. I feel like I totally enter into another realm, and get a glimpse of the mindset of a different culture -- more than I could ever fathom by reading history or nonfiction.

 

I think, in the end, it's just a quirk on my part. Sort of like enjoying a certain piece of music or a certain flavor. My all time favorite author is Italo Calvino, and I never read Austin, so obviously I'm on a different page than most people I know in regards to literary taste.

 

I gotta go get kids to dance class, but didn't want to forget to answer this, no matter how cursorily. I think about this throughout the day, now, and may have something better to say later.

[Stacy in NJ]

You need to think about it in it's larger sense. It's really the history(pre-history) of all of the people of South America; it continuation, failures, reality and mythical stories, Spanish colonialism, and tribes. It's a book more about culture and connection more than a narrrative.

 

I recommend getting a study guide. :)

 

I would compare it to Huck Finn, as a kind of map to the culture.

[PrairieAir]

Hmmm, I think I like meandering. I tend to write a little that way. That isn't what bothered me.

 

I think I just really did not identify with or like any of the characters other than Ursula. There were others I started to like, but they disappointed me. I couldn't get past certain relationships either.

 

What Stacy says about history and culture interests me. I did pick up a hint of that, but it just didn't seem to make a lot of sense. The pieces didn't fit together for me to really understand that. Maybe I should get a study guide. I'm curious, but I don't want to spend too much more time on this book. Maybe I'll skim the study guide in Borders;)

 

SFP, the book you mentioned sounds interesting. I think I may see if it's at one of the local libraries.

[Catherine]

reading The Iliad or Shakespeare. They are about history, people and a culture that are unfamiliar to me, so I needed a study guide, and careful re-reading of many parts to understand it. They are not stories that on their surface interest me. Once I knew the context, and understood some of the deeper issues, I could comprehend them.

[LaMere Academy]

This was a bookclub book about 2 years ago and all the ladies, including myself disliked it very much. I'll admit I gave up about 100 pages from the end. I couldn't take it anymore.