#13 One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez

Happy Thursday, everyone! I hope you’re in the mood for a Quote-tacular Quote-a-palooza, because that’s what you’re getting today.

I’m not going to do a long-form review of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) for three reasons: 

1. The book follows multiple generations of the Buendía family in their fictional hometown of Macondo, and many of them share the same name. Writing a brief and/or coherent plot summary would be impossible.
2. It’s full of strange themes and stranger events, and I wouldn’t want any of these to sound off-putting. One Hundred Years of Solitude is INCREDIBLE, and you owe it a read.
3. My attempt at a review would probably come out like a garbled chain of superlatives, leaving no room for wit and no time for insight. (In other words, what’s the point?)

So instead of going the traditional route, I’m simply going to copy in all my favorite quotes. This way, you can taste a few delicious morsels or dip one of your wrinkly toes in. This way, you’ll get a sense of Márquez’s style, his timelessness, his surrealism, and his magic. This way, you’ll catch a glimpse of genius undiluted by my rambling.

This way, we all win.

Here we go. Happy reading!

…

That was the way he always was, alien to the existence of his sons, partly because he considered childhood as a period of mental insufficiency.

…

Normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war.

…

In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous.

…

He started writing again. For many hours, balancing on the edge of the surprises of a war with no future, in rhymed verse he resolved his experience on the shores of death.

…

“You have taken this horrible game very seriously and you have done well because you are doing your duty,” she told the members of the court. “But don’t forget that as long as God gives us life we will still be mothers and no matter how revolutionary you may be, we have the right to pull down your pants and give you a whipping at the first sign of disrespect.”

…

He had reached the end of all hope, beyond glory and the nostalgia of glory.

…

[Her] actions had been a mortal struggle between a measureless love and an invincible cowardice.

…

Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. 

…

The locked room, about which the spiritual life of the house revolved in former times, was known from that time on as the “chamberpot room.” 

…

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. 

…

The spirit of her invincible heart guided her through the shadows.

…

Once again she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle. 

…

Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.

…

Both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.

…

Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time? 

I WILL NOT DIGNIFY THIS WITH AN ANSWER.

Read: 2014