This Nobel prize winning work is fecund, savage,irresistible.... In all their loves, madness and wars, their alliances, compromises, dreams and deaths... The characters rear up large and rippling with life against the green pressure of nature itself
One hundred years of solitude - An Excerpt:
Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
It seemed as if some penetrating lucidity permitted her to see the reality of things beyond any formalism
"I dont have to go around hunting for men" she answered. "Iam taking these biscuits to Gerineldo because I'm sorry that sooner or later they're going to shoot him"
He underwent a new crisis of bad humor
It was a fine june night, cool and with a moon, and they were awake and frolicking in bed until dawn, indifferent to the breeze that passed through the bedroom
The new house, white, like a dove , was inagurated with a dance.
Colonel Aureliano Buendia organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all. He had seventeen male children by seventeen different women and they were exterminated one after the other on a single night before the oldest one had reached the age of thirty five, He survived fourteen attempts on his life, seventy three ambushes, and a firing squad. He lived through a dose of strychnine in his coffee that was enough to kill a horse.He refused the Order of merit, which the President of the Republic awarded him. He rose to be Commander in Chief of the revolutionary forces, with jurisdicion and command from one border to the other, and the man most feared by the government, but he never let himself be photographed.
It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days. The sky crumbled into a set of destructive storms and out of the north came hurricanes that scattered roofs about and knocked down walls and uprooted every last plant of the banana groves.
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Last Updated: December 11, 1998