Bay Area Book Club's Book for month of January: One Hundred Years of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Avaliable at Barns & Nobels & Borders Bookstores

Our Monthly discussion will be hold on Sunday, January 22 ,2006 at 4:00pm: Borders BookStore located on 39210 Fremont Hub Fremont, CA 94538. Interested participants please email us at bayareabookclub@gmail.com for RSVP.

About the Book

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a book that took the world by storm. It's a furious, passionate, seething novel filled with hallucinogenic scenery. With his groundbreaking book, Gabriel García Márquez not only established himself as a writer with singular vision, he also established Latin American literature and "magical realism" as forces to be reckoned with. There are many millions of copies in print worldwide, and the readership is so thrilled, the novel has been translated into more than three-dozen languages. Because of the ground he broke with One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature. The first work in Spanish to become, a U.S. bestseller (it was originally published and widely read in Spanish in 1967) this was, in 1970 the book to read. And read it we did—and more than 30 years later, we still do!

Why You Should Read It

Read One Hundred Years of Solitude because of its passion. It's a wildly passionate book that brings to life mythical and colorful characters. In Macondo, wonderful, magical, fantastical, unreal things happen every day. They swirl on a canvas as unique and foreign as any you have known yet they evoke basic human truths that are as real as every day. And through this fantastic town and its fantastic people, you will come to appreciate the magic of your own life. It's a book where a lot happens, and what happens will move you. You'll find your blood boils and your stomach flips from all the love, compassion, conflict, heartbreak, beauty, stubbornness, despair, humor, simplicity, complexity, intellect and prophecy. One Hundred Years of Solitude will inspire you to connect with your family, love more deeply and dream bigger and find deeper truths within yourself.

About the Author

Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez was born on March 6, 1928 to Luisa Santiaga Marquez Iguaran and Gabriel Eligio Garcia in Aracataca, Colombia. Luisa's parents did not approve of her marriage to Gabriel and Marquez, the oldest of twelve children, was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. On December 6, in the Cienaga train station, between 9 and 3,000 striking banana workers were shot and killed by troops from Antioquia. The incident was officially forgotten and omitted from Colombian history textbooks. Although Marquez was still a baby, this event was to have a profound effect on his writing.

When Marquez was eight years old, his grandfather died. At that time it was also clear that his grandmother, who was going blind, was increasingly helpless. He was sent to live with his parents and siblings, who he barely knew, in Sucre. A bright pupil, he won scholarships to complete his secondary education at the Colegio Nacional. There he discovered literature and admired a group of poets called the piedra y cielo ("stone and sky"). This group included Eduardo Carranza, Jorge Rojas, and Aurelio Arturo and their literary grandfathers were Juan Ramon Jimenez and Pablo Neruda. In 1946, Marquez entered law school at the National University of Bogota. There he began reading Kafka and publishing his first short stories in leading Liberal newspapers.