One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
Recommendations from our site
“Our greatest classic of all time, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a fantasy novel. But when you go to libraries, you never see it in the fantasy section. They put it in the section of Latin American literature, or of classic literature or of Nobel Prize literature. But it is a fantasy…One Hundred Years of Solitude is a saga. It’s the story of a family, from the couple that had the first kids to the end of the family, which is also the end of times. When you read reviews of One Hundred Years of Solitude, they’ll say it’s the story of Latin America—and perhaps it is. But, essentially, it’s the story of a town from when it is founded until it finishes its history…It really amazes me that a person from a tiny town in the Caribbean area, which is not the most developed in the country, was able to accomplish this huge achievement. Cien años de soledad is a great novel like Don Quijote de la Mancha. It’s that big.” Read more...
Pilar Quintana, Novelist
“Rabassa has accomplished something utterly terrific in his translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel, which was revolutionary in its structure and its use of imagination, is now absolutely compelling in English as well as in Spanish. On the assumption that most people who have been influenced by García Márquez in the English speaking world have been influenced through Rabassa’s translation, it had a huge effect on novel writing in English. Writers like Toni Morrison, for example, or Salman Rushdie.” Read more...
Edith Grossman, Translator
“I just loved all the different aspects of it. There is such inventive language and concepts, and the whole magical realism thing really appeals to me. There is humour as well…..In this book there are seven generations of a family with a very definite beginning and end.” Read more...
The best books on Family History
Turtle Bunbury, Historian
“What García Márquez does is tell a story of the history and culture of Latin America from the point of view of the ordinary person. He manages to do that through this deadpan narrator who can mix the savagely real with the wonderful, and narrate a family saga which is also a history of Latin America. This book really put Latin American literature on the international map because it is a novel which, while deeply Latin American, is also accessible to all readers.” Read more...
The Best Latin American Novels
John King, Literary Scholar
This landmark work of Colombian literature charts the story of seven generations of the Buendiá family, living in the mythical town of Macondo. Like The Alchemist, the story is set in motion by a dream vision: patriarch José Arcadio establishes Macondo after dreaming of a “city of mirrors,” and becomes the site of many magical and marvellous happenings. Author Gabriel García Márquez—known fondly as ‘Gabo’ across South America—won the Nobel Prize in 1982 “for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent’s life and conflicts.” If you enjoyed the fable-like structure of The Alchemist, we think you’ll like the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez.
From our article Books like The Alchemist
