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.

Marked as one of the greatest works of literature, Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude feels more like poetry than a traditional book. Layered with lyrical prose, Márquez narrates the novel in such a way that it resists the logic of realism, casting a dreamlike haze over even the most brutal events. This style, known as magical realism, is one Márquez pioneered - where the extraordinary slips effortlessly into the everyday, and where reality itself is infused with myth, memory, and imagination. In Macondo, the fictional town at the heart of the novel, flying carpets and insomnia plagues coexist with revolutions and railroad expansions. Rather than drawing lines between what is real and what is not, Márquez suggests that memory, perception, and cultural inheritance are just as powerful as objective truth.

The toughest part of this novel is probably one of its most deliberate quirks—the repetitive naming of the Buendía family members. Nearly every generation includes an Aureliano or a José Arcadio, creating a cycle of names that mirrors the cycles of behavior and fate within the family. If you don’t read the book in a relatively short span, the characters start to blur, their identities collapsing into one another. But this is clearly intentional. What may seem at first like a confusing narrative decision becomes a powerful metaphor for the inescapable repetition of history. Each generation inherits not just a name, but a pattern - of solitude, of obsession, of political violence and romantic longing. Wars repeat themselves for reasons that become increasingly vague. Love is mistaken for fate. Progress is mistaken for salvation. This recursive structure implies that time in Macondo does not move forward, but in a circle.

At times, it feels as though there is no clear plot - Márquez favors lush, evocative imagery over a traditional narrative arc. Characters drift in and out of the story in seemingly sporadic ways, their entrances and exits often unexplained. Entire lifetimes can be erased in a single, unceremonious sentence, only for the next several pages to dwell lovingly on the scent and bloom of springtime flowers. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not really interested in building suspense or following a linear storyline than in creating a rhythm of spiritual patterns that ensnare the Buendía bloodline. In doing so, Márquez suggests that life itself rarely unfolds in a neat sequence. Instead, it moves in cycles - of joy and sorrow, love and loss, memory and forgetting. Human existence, the novel implies, is both momentary and infinite; a fleeting glimpse within the vast, looping continuum of time.

It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.