One of the Aurelianos slept his way through a war, and every single one of the eighteen sons he sired inherited the name. There are a few people who married into the family who don’t have one of those five names, but if you are ever on a quiz show and have to answer a question about characters in One Hundred Years of Solitude, just say “Aureliano” and you have a good chance of being right, because there are TWENTY-TWO of them. The girls are all either Remedios, Amaranta, or Úrsula. The boys are all named either Aureliano or José Arcadio. That, and history repeats itself.Įach generation of the Buendía family is indistinguishable from any other one.

As far as I can tell, this is largely the point of the novel: to talk about how awful humans/humanity is. Towards the end of the book, Márquez writes that “literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people” (388). They are all despicable and spend their time starting pointless wars or sleeping with inappropriate people. They all have the same name and therefore are basically impossible to keep apart. It’s about several generations of the Buendía family. I just list some of the worst things that happen in the book with limited commentary as a way to explain why I didn’t like it. This is not the worst book I’ve ever read, but it may be my least favorite. According to the about the author in the back of the book, Márquez is “widely considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.” I would very much like someone to explain to me why that is, because I hated every minute I spent reading this one… and I feel like I was reading it for a hundred years. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is a classic, and the author actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Never have I been so happy to be able to return a book to a library and never think about it again.

I have never been so happy to finish a book.

100 days of solitude book review