##=##=##=##=##=##=##=##=    BOOKS^•^     =##=##=##=##=##=##=##=##

I actually really liked this book. It reminds me a lot of Wuthering Heights because both of their plots are centered around a certain bloodline and house(s). My favourite part of the book was the section about the war, I think my fav character might've been Colonel Aureliano. I thought his character was interesting because I love to read about a good descent into madness and a slow corruption. It was sad to see how he let that friend of his get killed, and I like this quote said by Aureliano's other close friend.

" "Watch out for your heart, Aureliano," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez would say to him then. "You're rotting alive." "

I was happy to see Colonel Aureliano finally get back to himself and decide not to kill his best friend. I also really loved how the author writes about the characters' deaths -- they're all so strange and bittersweet, especially Arcadio's and Amaranta's.

" In the shattered schoolhouse where for the first time he had felt the security of power, a few feet from the room where he had come to know the uncertainty of love, Arcadio found the formality of death ridiculous. Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia. "

In general I really liked the "crazy" situations that the author sprinkles in every once in a while. I wish we got more of that Jose Arcadio Segundo (the one who survived the massacre at the station.) Those few pages were disturbing -- J.A.S waking up next to thousands of corpses, having to crawl his way back covered in blood, and no one believing him. (By the way, what's with all this memory loss in the book and how characters don't believe any events that happened not even remotely in the past? It really reminds me of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the idea that the past doesn't exist and it can be manipulated as easily as people's minds can be manipulated.) The paralels/references are also something I really liked and that Ursula's right, that it really does feel like time goes in circles and eventually repeats itself.

" When he recognized his great-grandmother's voice he turned his head toward the door, tried to smile, and without knowing it repeated an old phrase of Ursula's.
     "What did you expect?" he murmured. "Time passes."
     "That's how it goes," Ursula said, "but not so much."
      When she said it she realized that she was giving the same reply that Colonel Aureliano Buendia had given in his death cell, and once more she shuddered with the evidence that time was not passing, as she had just admitted, but that it was turning in a circle. "

Overall I really liked the book, even though it was hard to get through all that pedophillia and incest. In a small way I see this book as a warning not to repeat the past's mistakes (don't have kids with your damn cousins!) as it, and everyone's ignorance towards the past (and towards themselves and others), eventually contributed to the downfall of Macondo and/or the Buendia bloodline.

" [...] everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second oppurtunity on earth. "