One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah's Classics Book Club Selections, #3) (Perennial Classics) (P.S.)

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gregory Rabassa (Translator)

'Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.' Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where Jose Arcadio Buendia and his strong-willed wife, Ursula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquiades excites Aureliano Buendia's father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands. Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, hauntings and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Buendia household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds...This new edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most celebrated novel is published to coincide with celebrations to mark the 80th birthday of this Nobel Prize winning author in 2007.

• ISBN10: 014103243X
• ISBN13: 9780141032436
• Publish Date: 2 August 2007 (first published 25 June 1970)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 24 October 2015
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 432
• Language: English

Reviews

[ibeforem]

I’m really not sure what to say about this book. In truth, I didn’t finish it, but, I did make it about 75% of the way through. I just got tired of it. It’s an interesting and original story, but horribly confusing at times. Most of the men are named after each other, so I was constantly trying to figure out which person was being spoken about, and how old they were. I didn’t even mind the mystical elements, or the more unsavory ones (such as one of the men marrying a girl who was essentially a child of 10 or 11). It just got to be too much. I’m glad I gave it a shot, but I’m not sorry I didn’t finish.

[jamiereadthis]

It’s been nearly a year now, but it was like this: my magical little bookstore man, both of us in the middle of the shelves, breaking off conversation now and then to tug at the spines of old friends.

He tapped there, Love in the Time of Cholera, and I smiled, nodding. He then tugged at its next door neighbor, this book, laying his hand to the cover. “I have always meant to read this too,” he said, and when I said the same— had never read it, always meant to— he looked up grinning. “You know, my dear, I do believe we are leading parallel lives.” He chuckled, then— shelved it again, fondly.

“It’s waiting for me,” he said, a sigh. He looked to me to make sure I understood: I did, exactly. “We’re patient, it will come. In the meantime, it’s nice to know it’s waiting, isn’t it— for both of us.”

And now, all I want to do is search every bookshop high and low until I shake him out again, press a worn copy in his hands and tell him to read, read, please don’t wait another minute. This is the book written for him most of all.