Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Reviewer: Suchitra Kumar

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Spanish writer with great beauty of style. Perhaps the fact that his books are translated from Spanish adds to the unusually lovely nuances of language. His greatest feat, however is to combine this engaging style of writing with an incredible skill for storytelling.

No single word can describe One Hundred Years of Solitude adequately. Wonderful, amazing, spellbinding, lyrical, and intricate are adjectives that spring to mind.

One Hundred Year of Solitude is a book in the genre of magic realism but its true genius lies in the fact that it is still an utterly believable story. The unusual and the fantastic are detailed in a matter-of-fact manner and the ordinary is elevated to the level of fantasy.

The story actually does span a hundred years, and chronicles the history of a place called Macondo. It captures Macondo's birth as a place where people start to live, its progress to a prosperous town, and then its demise back to nothingness. Entwined with Macondo's evolution is the life of the Buendia family. The book takes us through many generations of Buendias and their relationships with their friends and with Macondo itself. Through the generations, names and characters reappear and in a sense doom the family to a repetitive cycle of existence that will end with the fall of Macondo.

This modern epic is supposed to use Macondo as a mirror to the development of Latin America. However, the story it describes may be true of any place in the world since it deals with invasions and progress and how people evolve and react to these changes.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that can be read with these connections and interpretations in mind, or simply as a wonderful story.