Finished reading: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 📚.

This one is a real classic, perhaps the archetype of magical realism . That’s a style most associated with Latin American authors where things are going along just like we might ourselves expect to happen in real life. But occasionally something unquestionably fantastical happens. People fly, ghosts appear, spells are cast - whatever you can imagine. But to the characters in the book it’s perfectly normal, not even worth remarking on. Their world just works that way.

This book tells the story of many generations of a family in a beautiful, sometimes poetic, manner. In some parts it felt like hearing someone’s dream experience, other times more like a myth or legend from times long past.

Parts were somewhat disorientating to me, not least because many of the characters have similar names to each other; a fact remarked on within the book. It should be noted that there are some ‘uncomfortable’ scenes, and took me a good amount of focus to get through it. But it was an entirely worthwhile effort to make.