4/5 stars
Somehow I’d not already read this, despite loving magic realism a bit more than it probably deserves. It was different to what I was expecting. Far less realism, much more absurdity.
Still, it was mostly very enjoyable – and packed full of fantastic (in both senses) imagery and phrases.
But there’s just so much of this descriptive oddness that halfway through the sheer unrelenting imagination, sidetracks, asides, quirkiness, and deliberately meaningless obsessions becomes somehow repetitive. Pointless. Frustrating. No longer enjoyable.
But then the final chapter wraps it all up with a kind of thematic unity that makes this very repetition – the way the various stories blur into one despite their wild differences – all make sense. After enduring one hundred plus pages of annoyance, that wrap-up means I’ve ended up leaving One Hundred Years Of Solitude with affection – if not the love I was expecting.