Ah, One hundred years of solitude. A simple tale of José Arcadio, José Arcadio, José Arcadio, José Arcadio, Arcadio, Aureliano, Aureliano, Aureliano and Aureliano.
Or Cyril. I would have accepted a Cyril.
Anyway, this story covers, unsurprisingly, one hundred years of…activity (ok, that wasn’t a given) centred around the isolated town of Macondo and the Buendías family, its founders. It also deals with the encroachment of the modern world upon a traditional landscape and the conflict resulting from the fundamental differences of the two.
Filled with bizarre happenstances reported as fact, the majority of the book reads as a kind of myth or legend. Flying women, showers of rain lasting five years and zombie gypsies (well, just the one) all make an appearance. These are told as facts rather than tales and sharply contrast with the raw mundanity also present in the narrative, showing us a society to which superstition and mysticism is equally, if not more, real as science and logic.
Time is presented in more a circular fashion rather than strictly linier, with many sections occurring within a vague timeframe similar to the biblical ‘forty days and forty nights’.. The family names (as indicated above) echo this theme down through the generations and heighten the readers awareness of similar events and mistakes repeating themselves.
Speaking of the bible, there’s no doubt that this book is heavily patterned on the old testament, especially Genesis. The very first paragraph invokes Adam’s naming of the animals and presents the town itself as a kind of Eden. Establishing the modern/traditional conflict – this paragraph also contains a reference to the theory of evolution, juxtaposing the disparate viewpoints before the story has truly begun.
For all that, I’m sorry to say that I didn’t actually find the book at all appealing. While I realise that the repeating names were there to make a point, I just couldn’t get over my annoyance. I started referring to the family tree included in the book every other page and found it difficult to commit to any of the characters as a single entity. Moreover, the ‘magical realism’ felt more like suspension of disbelief to me, which jarred with what I believed the author was attempting to achieve.
Rating: 
