One Hundred Years of Solitude

This afternoon I finished reading, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.

It was my second time reading it. Out of habit, I read everything twice in order to suck all the necessary juicy juice out of it. The second read is always better, anyway.

It is the story of the Buendia family who lives in the far away village of Macondo. The prose is rich with detail and the characters are magical, flawed and wonderful creatures who unfold like paper birds.

I believe Garcia-Marquez is the father of Magical Realism, the literary movement. Magical Realism is a way of writing that describes the most fantanstic, unbelieviable action like it is the most ordinary and natural thing. For Example, along with the common cold and hurricanes, Macondo faces an insomnia plague and 4 years, 11 months and 2 days of non-stop rain. Garcia-Marquez describes these events in detail with absolute conviction, to make the reader see that the magical is just as real as the ordinary.

On the back of the book there is a review:

"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man...Mr. Garcia-Marquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful and meaningless in life." William Kennedy, New York Times

This book is one true to my heart, that will always be on my list of top ten favorites.