One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I am not quite ready to hail Marquez’s masterpiece as the finest piece of literature since Genesis. Yet his splendid Latin American tale is so awfully good that the moment of hailage is not too far away.

So lyrical, so dreamlike, One Hundred Years reads even better accompanied by Counting Crows’ “Dreaming Tree.” Appropriately enough there is so much from the sprawling story that stays etched in the memory, so many characters, so much tragedy and joy, so many modest yet profound life lessons.

What I found wanting—the plot device that cannot quite hide the fact that the novel is merely a series of short stories; that sexuality assumes too large a crutch to the novel’s plot—is easily brushed aside in the wonderment through which I shared the Buendi family’s fate.
Excellent