One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Awards and Nominations: Italy’s Chianciano Award, France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger, Venezuela’s Rómulo Gallegos Prize, and the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Probably this book set the stage for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the year 1982.

Rating : 3.9/5

This was my second book by the author, the first one being, “Love at the time of Cholera.”I would suggest you to read this book only if you have read a considerable amount of Literature otherwise you may quit reading the book halfway.

The story revolves around the lives of seven generations of Buendia family who live in an imaginary town called Mocando which is cut out from the rest of the world. Solitude is the most common thing through out the book. Every generation of the Buendia family has solitude in common apart from sharing the same titles of Aureliano’s and Jose Arcadio’s. The town suffers the perils of a war , deluge and other tenacious acts of destruction.Inspite of such a gloomy topic the book is lively because each generation has its own story which being the same in essence is very much different in content and thinking.Apart from the Buendias there is one interesting character named  Melquiades. He is a gypsy and spends the fag end of his life in the Buendia family. In his last years he writes a manuscript . To know more about the manuscript and the fate of the family do read this book.

Last but not the least I would like to quote one interesting paragraph from the book which will give you a glimpse of the Author’s style of writing.

"He dreamed that he was going into an empty house with white walls and that he was upset by the burden of being the first human being to enter it. In the dream he remembered that he had dreamed the same thing the night before and on many nights over the past few years and he knew that the image would be erased from his memory when he awakened because that recurrent dream had the quality of not being remembered except within the dream itself."