One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García MárquezMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
The writing is so beautiful. I love magical realism done well, and I think this is the best version of magical realism I've read. I also love sweeping fictional family histories.
My biggest complaint is the characters. The matriarch Ursula is a fully formed character and really the heroine of the book. Her daughter Amaranta is a spectacularly strange villain, and her son Colonel Aureliano is at least multi-faceted. Most of the other characters fall flat for me and not just because of the repeat names. I went through quite a bit of trouble to keep them straight in my mind but most of them just had shadows of personalities. For example, who is Santa Sofia, really? She barely gets involved with her bizarre daughter Remedios the beauty and doesn't react when her daughter ascends into heaven? Who is Jose Arcadio Segundo besides someone who resembles Aureliano Segundo?
But I do also object to the repeat names. It is a common Hispanic naming convention to name a son for his father and even a daughter for her mother, but this often remedied by an aggressive use of middle names and nicknames, such as when Renata Remedios (who actually does have a unique name) goes by Meme instead.
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