The Great American Read

My best loved book of all time would have to be One Hundred Years of Solitude. When I read One Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time, it really felt like I was reading both a history book and it was a fantasy book mixed with a history book. I was really awestruck. I read A Hundred Years of Solitude for the first time in English, and the second time I read it was in Spanish. It is the most wildly imaginative book that I've ever read. -

Narrator

The novel chronicles the rise and fall of a mythical town called Macondo, and the multiple generations of the Buendia family, who helped create it. The story is told in flashbacks and flash forwards, that fuse the fantastical with the everyday. The town and the Buendias survive wars, forbidden love affairs, and the invasion of foreigners and industrialization. I think, at its simplest level, the novel's the story of one family over generations. You see how Macondo changes from this remote blip on the map into a town and later, a railway's constructed that connects them to the rest of the world. You see the gringos arrive, and the formation of the Banana Republics. Latin Americans have lived with such harsh history, the kind of blood lust, the revolutions, the killings, the culture shock, all of these things that we have encountered in Latin American history that in themselves seem so outlandish that they're magical in themselves. It's not so much a literary device as a sort of understanding that okay, fantastical things explain terrible realities. Unlike traditional fantasy, where you're building a world that is completely separate from our real world, with a completely separate set of rules, magical realism is set in our world, but in it, these fantastical events happen, and they're taken sort of at face value, and I think it is this collapsing of the boundary between what's real and what's magic. -

John Lee

"A trickle of blood came out "under the door, crossed the living room, "went out into the street, "continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, "went down steps and climbed over curbs, "passed along the Street of the Turks, "turned a corner to the right, and another to the left, "made a right angle at the Buendia house, "went in under the closed door, "crossed through the parlor." The sentences are long, the paragraphs are long. You don't care. You're just immersed. The story has you so hypnotized that you can't breathe. I think the world of the novel have helped me provide this lens with which to understand a different reality, and to understand that there are many truths. My name is Andrea Gomph, and I'm here to tell you to vote for A Hundred Years of Solitude. This is a novel that will rock your socks off. You'll have drama, you'll have laughter, you'll have war, you'll have love. It's truly of epic proportions.