Garcia Marquez manages to detail the history of Latin America in the history of a family in a remote village. In engaging prose, we are taken through a metaphorical and surreal set of lifetimes in the Buendia family. The chart of family members comes in handy as the book jumps from timeframe to timeframe. The events that transpire in this book are beyond the normal experience of most of us. What has happened to this village, to this family (and by extension, to Colombia and Latin America more generally) can't be contained in the normal realm of experience, though, and so magical realism is born. Garcia Marquez deftly approaches this new surreality, pulling the reader ever onward toward the terminus of the Buendias. Anyone interested in the endurance of family, love and the human spirit in the face of a crippling modernity and the encroaching nature of technological 'progress' (with the inevitable exploitation of it by capitalism) should definitely check this novel out.
A celebration of the endless variety of life in the mythical village of Macondo chronicles the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of the small South American town. Reprint. 50,000 first printing.