One Hundred Years of Solitude

It is typical of Gabriel Garc a M rquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buend a, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:

A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buend a house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jos , and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where rsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
"Holy Mother of God!" rsula shouted.

The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by Jos Arcadio Buend a and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, Jos Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano Jos , Aureliano Segundo, and Jos Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two rsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of Garc a M rquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom Jos Arcadio Buend a has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buend a's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. Buend a's wife, rsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."

With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garc a M rquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature. --Alix Wilber