Gabriel Garcia Marquez : One Hundred Years Of Solitude

My life changed after reading that novel. It is impossible for me not to pay respect to it. I owe so much to that single book! Just as Rushdie called it 'the greatest novel in any language of the last fifty years'.

Its a plethora of human emotions, a reality of the entire race of humanity, a history that is at once eternal and timeless, something that has always existed and is forever present.

Each and every page of the novel is an 'instant' of the 'present'. There is no past. Illusions melt into reality, reality fuses with magical elements. Who is to separate them! Reality and fantasy have finally become one, only to heighten reality all the more, to press the incomprehensibility of what we call 'real'.

'One Hundred Years Of Solitude' is also an amazing example of what can be achieved through simplicity of language alone. The trick lies in how one moulds the language to do his bidding. Of course, it is much greater than any other work I have read so far, including those of Kafka's. I really love Kafka, and yet with all respect I must acknowledge that Marquez is perhaps the person to whom I owe my new-founded vision.

I was foolishly attempting to write an answer on the novel for examination purpose. Nothing could be more futile. You cannot pen down the features of the novel in 1000 words. You cannot say anything at all.

I still remember the time when I read the novel. Before my part one exams I had a slight fever I think. I was recovering and reading this novel. It took me three or four days to read, and the next three or four days I was numb, speechless.

The novel attracted and repulsed (because of the incest). It was magical and fantastic, and yet it was more real than most 'realistic' novels. It bewildered, it bewitched, it amazed, it teased, it played with all the emotions imaginable including that of disgust.

If there is anything called 'the Bible' then here it is. If there is any Heaven, if there is any Hell then they are present here in this novel. Solitude is our Hell, and love our Heaven! And 'love' is what the Buendias lack, thus they are doomed with an unchosen solitude.

The family cannot differentiate between 'true love' and 'true lust', and in their confusion, just as with fantasy and reality, they blend these two is the same palette too, to create a feeling unique and of its own kind, a feeling that cannot be defined either as love or lust. Perhaps, if the word 'life' was indicative of any feeling at all then this is it.