Teaser Tuesday 217: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current book or recent read.
* Share a few "teaser" sentences from somewhere in the book.
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (Make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away. You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title and author so that other participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teaser!


This week I am reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez. I admit, I am struggling to get through this group read. It is slightly confusing keeping all the same-named characters straight, and the two-page long meandering paragraphs don't help. I started it last Thursday and am only about halfway through. It is not a fast read. I'm making it easy on myself this week by posting the opening sentences for my teaser.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.

(Chapter 1)

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Probably Garcí­a Márquez finest and most famous work. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of a mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human rice. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man...Mr. Garcí­a Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound, meaningful, and meaningless in life."--William Kennedy, New York Times Book Review

"Fecund, savage, irresistible....In all their loves, madness and wars, their alliances, compromises, dreams and deaths....The characters rear up large and rippling with life against the green pressure of nature itself."--Paul West, Book World