Described by The New York Times as the “first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis”, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is a fascinating story of the vibrant Buendia family in a little South American town of Macondo, whom Jose Arcadio Buendia, the patriarch of the legendary clan, along with his minions discovered accidentally in one of their expeditions.

Macondo becomes a melting pot of diverse people that struggled on their way to fulfilling their respective personal quests. It has also become a haven of tragedy, prosperity and many deaths that culminated a very historical and eccentric story.

The Buendia clan, as should be aptly referred to since there have been marriages and even incestuous marriages that ensued, truly represented Macondo’s mysterious, wild and humorous tale of adventures that led to one of the most critically-acclaimed novel in Latin American history, which even won a Nobel Prize for Literature and the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize for literature of Venezuela in 1972.

The story is a metaphorical approach in recounting the stories of the real town of Macondo in Colombia. There were articles written about this wonderful novel, which as critics claimed, its actual events actually happened based on historical fact. The civil war, the workers’ protest against an American company that resulted to a massacre, and some of the struggles of Macondo due to the onset of the foreigners’ occupation (gypsies, government officials, priests, various military forces, the ubiquitous lawyers, the railway, the American capitalists, the European with the bicycle and the passion for airplanes etc.), that were depicted in the story actually happened in real life.

It is amazing to note how Marquez eventually transformed and emphasized real events, along with his own marvelous ideas, to create an incredible storyline in the disguise of fiction.

As one critic put it, “the intermingling of the fantastic and the factual throughout the novel keeps us always on edge, always in a state of imaginative anticipation, particularly in the story of the Buendia men, whose imaginations are repeatedly going off in various directions, in schemes which are the constant source of amusement, novelty, and delight.”

Personally, the novel just blew me away.

That, I mean in a very positive note. Even though it took me a long time to finish the novel, not because it bored me but because personal commitments had to come in between my leisure reading, every page turned was well worth it. It captivated me and brought me in a state of overwhelming praise for such immensely admirable writing prowess.

While I was reading the first few chapters, I was really in awe with how incredibly out of this world Marquez’ imagination is. He would write in such a way that even the most bizarre phenomena seem normal. And truly, Marquez consequently introduced me to the real beauty of MAGICAL REALISM, coined by the German art critic Franz Roh in 1925 to describe "a magic insight into reality." Gabriel Garcia Marquez showed this through seemingly impossible events that appear vividly to anyone who reads it. For instance, the marvel in Rebecca’s weird habits of eating dirt, the insomnia plague, Remedios the Beauty ascending to the sky while doing her laundry, the horrifying truth about incestuous relationships and the many locked-doors solitude because of love, desperation, fear and failure that took away many lifetimes just proved Marquez’ genius.

I particularly love the ending, when all truths were revealed in the parchments of the great Melquiades, whom I believe is the main source of the obsession for finding all answers to all life’s questions, and explained with utmost sophistication the fulfillment of prophecies and tragedies in one whole grain of truth.

There are so many scholarly and critical reviews of One Hundred Years of Solitude since its release in 1963. There have been debates whether it’s just a simple escapist read or an epic meant to tell an event that could alter, or at least affect, a history.

But for me, I will just take it as a simple tale of how time can make or break wonders in this mortal existence. The story of the Buendia family is a testament to the abrupt and crazy changes brought by time and how each and every one can always have a shot to either make a difference or repeat a terrible fate brought by history or what you call, destiny.

Unfortunately for us, life doesn’t present all we need to know in a silver platter. There is always something that surprises us that feeds our minds and can force us to be better or worse. And it takes a lot of risk, even a tad to become a little bit crazy, to have one shot in this lifetime. Or probably the next.

But as the last line in the novel goes, races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. So let’s take it all in good time.

All in good time.