This is one of those books that I suspect a lot of people mean to read but never quite get round to. Much like A Suitable Boy or 1984, a modern classic in other words. I started it on the train up to Aberdeen and the woman next to me confided, somewhat shamefully, that she had started it three times but had never managed to finish it. This did not fill me with optimism.
As Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces the firing squad, the history of his family is told in a series of wandering flashbacks where the Buendia dynasty proliferates like Japanese knotweed. The Buendias do not have a family tree as an unpruned shrubbery and the family relationships are more complicated even than those of the Dingle clan. I suspect I'm not the only one forced to scribble a family tree on a scrap of paper and even then my pen ran out. This is not helped by what I can only describe as Marquez's complete lack of imagination when it came to naming his characters. Three characters are named Arcadio (or some variation thereof) and, ridiculously, Aureliano himself has seventeen sons - all named Aureliano.
Despite these small, if irritating, niggles there is something enchanting about the way Marquez weaves his tale. Magic and realism coexist in a sort of rough-and-tumble Eden and fantastic tales of talking to ghosts and dabbling in alchemy are interwoven with more mundane life as the Buendias marry, cook, gossip and feud. Even though I couldn't always work out who a character was or how he related to the rest of the family I was carried away in Marquez's bewitching tale and deposited unwillingly, if slightly bemused, at the end.
Read On: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Similar tales of magical realism include: Shame by Salman Rushdie; Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes; The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa; and Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis.
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