Thursday, August 6, 2020

One Hundred Years of Solitude

I'm not sure how I managed to avoid reading Gabriel García Márquez's most famous novel for as long as I did.  Perhaps it was simply because I have some vague memory that Love in the Time of Cholera was only okay.  I enjoyed this one more.  There are a lot of beautiful and amusing descriptions, and despite their cartoonish outlines many characters are believable enough that you get drawn into caring what happens to them.  I guess this is how a good telenovela is supposed to work though.  In a sense, that's what mostly the book is. Passion. Intrigue. Mystery. Scandal.  Humor.  Drama.  It has it all.  And then it has it again with the next set of characters in a slowly evolving cast of Buendías.  The long multi-generational arc of the story is enjoyable, but don't feel too bad if you miss a few episodes in the middle -- you'll have no trouble picking it back up.

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