One Hundred Years of Solitude (Oprah's Book Club)
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel  Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father  took him to discover ice."It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be  many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the  hero ofOne Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendía, stands before the  firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck  with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room,  went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the  Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left,  made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door,  crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went  on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room  table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen  under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano  José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where  Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread."Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded  by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all  sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano,  and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José  Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Úrsulas, a handful of  Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air.  If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic  and deeply tragic at the same time, thenOne Hundred Years of  Solitudedoes the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams  shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with  sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's  magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom  José Arcadio Buendía has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's  shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which  to clean its wound. Buendía's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the  next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he  was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the  house."WithOne Hundred Years of SolitudeGabriel García  Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into  more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in  Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature.--Alix Wilber