Gabriel Garcia Marquez; One Hundred Years of Solitude.

"During that interminable night, while Colonel Gerineldo Marquez thought about his dead afternoons in Amaranta's sewing room, Colonel Aureliano Buendia scratched for many hours trying to break the hard shell of his solitude." How we can empathise with Colonel Aureliano Buendia, as we become more and more engrossed in One Hundred Years of Solitude we soon realise the book has in turn made us one of the many isolated figures the book depicts.

Usually in this part of the blog I would give a general overview regarding the book, unfortunately in a book of this scale it is hard to say what the book is "about." One Hundred Years of Solitude is the quintessential postmodernist text, it uses the abstract and the unusual to form a tale of epic proportions. Even the characterization is bizarre, within 420 pages of literature there are over twenty characters whom at some point could be considered the "main character," only to consequently die and be replaced.

If this book is about anything it is about the passage of time and how time is recorded through the experience of our families. There is little description that can be added to that; that will not give away the plot or under-sell the story in some way. The only narrative point that seems pertinent is that offered by the blurb; "Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, haunting and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Bunedia household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds..."

To close, this is perhaps the most ambiguous of all my blog posts but unfortunately there is little I can say to do service to such a marvellous book. A book of such epic proportions and huge scale can only be understood through reading. Reading is all too frequently described as an "experience," or an "adventure," but if there was ever a time for such clichés this is it.