Cien a?os de soledad: Edici?n conmemorativa (The 40th Anniversary Edition) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Cien a?os de soledad: Edici?n conmemorativa (The 40th Anniversary Edition)
Book Review: Good but possibly overrated
Summary: 4 Stars
This is the first Latin American novel I have read. So I was not sure what to expect. For the first hundred or so pages I was quite enchanted by the "magical realism". Then I began to get a bit impatient as the narrative did not seem to centre in on any particular character, everyone was whizzing on and off stage and, in truth the characters seemed to be rather two dimensional. At this point I looked the book up on Wikipedia and found it was an allegory about the history of Columbia. I remember once reading that good allegory, really good allegory, should be enjoyable even if the reader doesn't know it is allegory (Gulliver's Travels, Erewhon, Animal Farm being possible examples). So in that sense cien anos didn't fit the bill.
But as I read longer I noticed the pattern that all the characters seem to end up with deliberately small lives out of spite for not getting what they want in life. My interest picked up again, being well aware of such a tendency in myself....By this time I was probably about two thirds of the way through and the book was nearing the home stretch and I read through the climax with enjoyment.
The edition is very good, it does give some special vocab, although my Spanish dictionary seemed to pick most words up. It has a very good family tree of all the characters in case you lose track.
So, worth reading certainly. That said, I understand that this book is supposed to be second only to Quijote in terms of sales of Spanish language books. I cannot, but cannot believe, that this is the second best book in the Spanish language. It's good, but not that good.