The novel, considered García Márquez’s magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon and in world literature.
—Wikipedia, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Despite its fame, I did not enjoy One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel meanders through a multi-generational story of the Buendías in a way that reminded me of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. But unlike that book, I never came to appreciate the characters I was spending hours wrapped up in. I can appreciate the prose García Márquez writes; true to the book’s praise, he has a specific way of crafting scenes and relationships by describing them in such straightforwardly beautiful ways.
Ultimately, it was the story and characters of One Hundred Years of Solitude that kept me from enjoying my time reading it. The Buendía family is so confusingly extensive that the book contains a family tree in the opening pages that most readers will urge you to study often. Characters come, and go, and come back again, before an unexpected event causes them to go again. García Márquez uses these stylistic tactics as tools, but ones I never came to appreciate like so many other readers have.
After reading well past half of the book, I decided to stop reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. It remains the first, and only, book I’ve decided not to finish on this website. Rather than spend hours trying to make myself care about its dense, uninteresting prose, I decided to move on.