417 pages
English language
Published Nov. 19, 2006 by Harper Perennial Modern Classics.
Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.
The old man waited. Rain. Years. The colonel waited. Rain. No bananas. The women wept. The ghost. The beauty. The solitude. Love and death. All mixed up. Like the river. Muddy.
That's it.
This is, without exception, the single worst book I've ever read in my entire life. And now that I've seen there's a movie adaptation coming I feel like I need to scream my thoughts into the digital void.
This book gets hailed as one of the masterpieces; one of the greatest novels ever, but in actuality it's terrible, and it's terrible from the start. I stuck with this awful story right through to the end, because I thought, "If SO MANY people rave about this book, there must be a reason, right?" Wrong. And I felt ripped off that I DID commit to its ending, when the ending is really only the ultimate climax of its awfulness and depravity. The best I can imagine as to why people like it is that perhaps this might be a lot of people's first experience at magic realism, and maybe THAT'S why they …
This is, without exception, the single worst book I've ever read in my entire life. And now that I've seen there's a movie adaptation coming I feel like I need to scream my thoughts into the digital void.
This book gets hailed as one of the masterpieces; one of the greatest novels ever, but in actuality it's terrible, and it's terrible from the start. I stuck with this awful story right through to the end, because I thought, "If SO MANY people rave about this book, there must be a reason, right?" Wrong. And I felt ripped off that I DID commit to its ending, when the ending is really only the ultimate climax of its awfulness and depravity. The best I can imagine as to why people like it is that perhaps this might be a lot of people's first experience at magic realism, and maybe THAT'S why they like it? But it's not even good magic realism. The entire story is depressing with zero redemption; it's full of death, rape, incest, suicide, and infanticide (which is particularly awful). It is also bleedingly obvious that it was written by a man, as evidenced by all these macho men borderline ****ing their way through the story (and not always consensually) and all the women fawning over any of the aforementioned men whenever they're near them.
This book, as I've said, has zero redemptive features. At all. Let me be clear, it's not that this book didn't live up to the hype I had built up for it; it didn't live up to any measure of "good". It smashed through the floor of my lowest respect, and then kept plummeting right up until the last page. I hated this book so much and thought that it was so bad that once I finished it I didn't donate it or pass it on; I actually threw it in the bin.
This book is truly awful, and I fail to see how anyone can LIKE it, let alone love it enough to recommend.
