Great Press for One Hundred Years

"After all, [Gabriel García Márquez's] classic One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967 in Buenos Aires, ranks, along with Don Quixote as the most significant and most extensively read novel of the Spanish language. Plus, after James Joyce and Franz Kafka pushed fiction to the edges of despair, Gabo is credited with almost single-handedly reinvigorating the genre of the novel and for placing Latin American fiction on the global shelf."— Ivan Stavans, The Boston Globe, November 23, 2003

"It is 1982 [the year Gabo won the Nobel Prize for Literature] and Gabriel García Márquez is already famous as the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is selling better than the Bible in some Spanish-speaking countries." — Anthony Day and Marjorie Miller, Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1990   "It is not easy to describe the techniques and themes of the novel without making it sound absurdly complicated, labored and almost impossible to read. In fact, it is none of these things. Though concocted of quirks, ancient mysteries, family secrets and peculiar contradictions, it makes sense and gives pleasure in dozens of immediate ways." — Robert Kiely, The New York Times, March 1970

"It is not easy to describe the techniques and themes of the novel without making it sound absurdly complicated, labored and almost impossible to read. In fact, it is none of these things. Though concocted of quirks, ancient mysteries, family secrets and peculiar contradictions, it makes sense and gives pleasure in dozens of immediate ways." — Robert Kiely, The New York Times, March 1970

"One Hundred Years of Solitude...can justly lay claim to being, perhaps, the greatest of all Latin American novels, appropriately enough, since the story of the Buendía family is obviously a metaphor for the history of the continent since Independence, that is for the neocolonial period. More than that, though, it is also, I believe, a narrative about the myths of Latin American History." — Gerald Martin, Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, Cambridge University Press, 1987

"Surrealism, García Márquez has said, 'comes from the reality of Latin America,' and many critics regard the book as a symbolic recognition of that region's social and political history." — Curt Suplee, Washington Post, October 22, 1992

"Reading his books, one realizes that the key to García Márquez's success—and the reason we love his literature—lies in his extraordinary capacity to accept and enjoy life on multiple dimensions. His talent to blend magic and reality relieves us from the rationalist Cartesian split, so unhealthy for the spirit, and presents and alternative, wholesome way to embrace both. This is precisely why his writings provoke such a sensual joy. They let our imagination roam free in our bodies and infuse us with the magical powers inherent in the human condition. His writing shows us, Latin Americans, a credible version of our own history: not the academic version of the history books that in no way resemble our experience but the version we learn by living in forsaken towns and cities where lunatics and crocodiles roamed the streets and where dictators kept prisoners in cages alongside their pet lions and jaguars." —Giocondo Belli, Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 16, 2003

"Gabriel García Márquez, who has a poet's blood in a fiction writer's heart, transformed his youthful realism into the restless primeval fantasy of his masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, a book so rich in imaginings that its translation into English has left it undiminished." — William Logan, The Washington Post, November 25, 1979

"It is said future generations will see Latin America of the 20th century through [Gabriel García Márquez's] eyes, much as we see Russia of the last century through Leo Tolstoy's eyes or England through the prism of Charles Dickens." — Linda Diebel, The Toronto Star June 27, 1998

"The fecund, savage, irresistible...you have a sense of living, along with the Buendías (and the rest) in them, through them and in spite of them, and all their loves, madnesses and wars, their alliances, compromises, dreams and deaths...the characters rear up large and rippling with life against the green texture of nature itself." — Paul West Bookworld
 
"One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Colombian Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel García Márquez, is to the second half of the century what Ulysses was to the first." — Alan Ryan, The Washington Post January 12, 1992

"This novel delighted me more than any has since I left college, 40 years ago. Which means that I put it, seriously and at once, into the top class, the classic Middlemarch - Madam Bovary bracket. It is outrageously funny, deeply tragic, and so marvelously alive that after reading it real-life people seem, as they do after reading Balzac, to be 'the shadows of shades.'" — Anne Fermantle, Commonweal, December 4, 1970