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There would be no better book to start with. It is an excellent and horrible book. It has engaging writing but is full of triggers.
I could spend a lifetime drawing out many subjects from One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a microcosm of the human condition demonstrated in a seductive text.
The book covers one hundred years of the Buendía family and the foundation and evolution of Macondo, starting with the couple José Arcadio and Úrsula, cousins who get married.
When I read that Macondo could be anywhere in Latin America, it was 100% correct. It is Brazil without being Brazil. It is where the people fight between liberals and conservatives without knowing what they are fighting for. It is where the population is forgotten, erased, and survives with almost naive blindness by impoverishment. Not to mention local and foreign greed.
The contradiction that exists in us Latinos. Conservative and progressive, sensual and extremely religious. The hypocrisy blooms in the cracks of the sidewalks.
We can see the male freedom to care for female morals. The matriarch is the point of connection and union. The cruel reality, even hidden under fantasy.
Time and history are cyclical. The names and intimate feelings too. We are all alone at the time of our afflictions and at the time of death, even amid an immense family. And susceptible to erasure by time and history.
SPOILER ALERT
About the Writer:
Nobel Prize in Literature, Colombian Gabriel García Marquez was a journalist and one of the great writers of the 20th century. Also known as Gabo, his work has been translated into over 36 languages. His books reached worldwide success in the 1960s and 1970s and reflected Latin America and the human condition, specially about loneliness.
Other Books: Love in Times of Cholera (1985), The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (1955), Chronicles of a Death Foretold (1981), On Love and Other Demons (1995), Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores (2004)
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