Customer Reviews
Good but possibly overrated - By: Uncle Vodka, 14 May 2008 
This is the first Latin American novel I have read. So I was not sure what to expect. For the first hundred or so pages I was quite enchanted by the "magical realism". Then I began to get a bit impatient as the narrative did not seem to centre in on any particular character, everyone was whizzing on & off stage and, in truth the characters seemed to be rather two dimensional. At this point I looked the book up on Wikipedia & found it was an alllegory about the history of Columbia. I remember once reading that good alllegory, reallly good alllegory, should be enjoyable even if the reader doesn't know it is alllegory (Gulliver's Travels, Erewhon, Animal Farm being possible examples). So in that sense cien anos didn't fit the bill.
But as I read longer I noticed the pattern that alll the characters seem to end up with deliberately smalll lives out of spite for not getting what they want in life. My interest picked up again, being well aware of such a tendency in myself....By this time I was probably about two thirds of the way through & the book was nearing the home stretch & I read through the climax with enjoyment.
The edition is very good, it does give some special vocab, although my Spanish dictionary seemed to pick most words up. It has a very good family tree of alll the characters in case you lose track.
So, worth reading certainly. That said, I understand that this book is supposed to be second only to Quijote in terms of sales of Spanish language books. I cannot, but cannot believe, that this is the second best book in the Spanish language. It's good, but not that good.
