“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

Great first line. Always going to be a tough act to follow.

There are good ways and bad ways of reading a novel. Carefully, taking one’s time, out loud, all fall in the former category. Ten minutes at a time here and there spread over a month or so is definitely the wrong way to read any book, especially one as dense and complex as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. This was more from force of circumstance than a conscious decision, but I wouldn’t recommend it. One practical consequence was a serious problem with following the narrative, even down to the simple task of understanding the differences between the characters. Marquez didn’t make this easy (I say this not by way of complaint – it is not the author’s job to make their novels easy to read!) by having only a handful of recurring names for the novel’s many different characters.

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of seven generations of the Buendía Family in the town of Macondo in Columbia. The story opens with the family patriarch, Arcadio Buendía, facing the firing squad for crimes against the Government. The narrative then takes the reader back to the founding of Macondo by the Buendía family. Initially Macondo is isolated from the outside world, apart from an annual visit by a band of gypsies, who show the townspeople technology such as magnets, telescopes, and ice. Melquíades, the gypsy king, becomes a recurring figure in the novel and the key to its final resolution. When Macondo becomes involved in the affairs of the wider world its troubles begin. A rigged election inspires Aureliano Buendía to join the rebellion against the Conservative government. I know how he feels.

The Buendia family saga feels longer that it is. The large cast of characters grow up, fall in love, or not, then die, to be succeeded steadily by the next generation with their own challenges and successes. It could have been the disjointed way I read this novel, but I found the steady march of the years made it difficult to engage with the characters who never made it off the page and became real for me.

100 years made a huge impact when it was first published, and remains highly thought of. The magical realism motif (I think I did well to get this far without using that term) was almost revolutionary at the time – it would be wrong to say it has become passe, but it certainly doesn’t have the same impact more than fifty years on. I enjoyed the light-hearted aspects of this novel the most, the way science and magic are blended together to prove that Arthur C Clarke saying that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.  The people of Macondo react in alarm and wonder to things such as films where an actor who dies in one film “reappears alive” in another, but take magic carpets in their stride.

There’s lots to enjoy in this novel. Some characters will appeal, and if they don’t another (probably with the same name) will appear soon enough. The prose is poetic and usually stays the right side of over the top. Some scenes are comic, others more disturbing, but I don’t think it takes itself too seriously despite the serious themes.

Finally I leave you with this review from a reader who took the trouble to post a review online, but didn’t take a lot of trouble with the reading of the novel itself:

“(It) didn’t do much for me; just a load of people sitting on a mat, munching.”