Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
reads the famous first sentence of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel narrates the fortunes and misfortunes of the Buendía family over seven generations in the fictional town of Macondo which was established by the family patriarch José Arcadio Buendía in Colombia ending with the Buendia home and clan being destroyed in a storm of incestuous love.
This novel is by no means an easy read. Latin American literature is unique in its style and pace. The novel is filled with lush sentences, complex characters and follows a non-linear narrative. There is no central protagonist to the story, as the years pass the characters grow old and die only to reappear as ghosts or reincarnations.
