I was not prepared for the seemingly effortless flow and vividness of Gabriel García Márquez's writing. In this journey through the family tree of the Buendias, we are treated through a trail of political turmoil, obsessive pursuits of knowledge, incestuous entanglements, mythological fears and forecasts, and perseverance and preservation of lineage. There is rarely anything in its dense chapters that is dull or useless, as each passing moment feels like an opportunity of insight into a family that demonstrates more similarities to one another as their generational gap may suggest.

That flow that I had previously mentioned is what entrenched me into its chapters as Marquez uses the power of words to travel us through each family member's various experiences. The effortless flow allows the story to move from one character to another, from one time period to the next (at times not even through a chronological fashion), as a form of recognition of the significance of a moment from an individual level and a communal one, and also the emphasising the insight that we gain on an objective fact would consistently morph based on the accumulated information shared by its astute and loving narrator. It always feels like I am learning something new and perhaps this is attributed to the feeling that Marquez himself feels like he is also learning something new as these characters unfold.

Due to its overall density, there is still so much to take in, and not everything could be retained from a single sitting. Much like looking at the size of the book itself, the depth of this novel felt more like the span of a towering forest than an expansive field. We are encouraged to look vertically into these characters, their history and the interconnectedness of it all, whilst also horizontally through the events that are taking shape within the Buendia home and all of Macondo, which both reveal themselves to be key characters to the overall narrative.

However, it was also that density that withheld me from showering this with a perfect score. I feel that there is still so much that I have missed in its intricate details that a full appraisal still feels half-baked for me. I may have powered through One Hundred Years of Solitude within a few days and each passing moment was just as vivid as it was when I first picked it up, but I knew that what I held inside my mind was still an abstraction of the Buendias. It would be quite a task to have absorbed and understood over 100 years of a family's life within a span of a few days.