I picked this tome by Gabriel Garcia Marquez a few weeks ago. My fiancee is reading this for her summer session classes, thus why I picked it up (to read and to discuss with her).
Needless to say it's one of the more vivid books out there; lucid as well.
But I have a problem with the author, GGM.
The guy is obviously not a fan of brevity or succinctness, and I say that because of the inane run-on sentences that provide a useless amount of filler words and ad nauseum-like descriptions.
Oh yeah, and the reincarnations of the same characters with the same names throughout.
But hey, it's an alright book.
I agree that he gets a bit too wordy, but it's generally worth it in the end. His impact on magical realism fiction is quite exciting.
I love his use of language. One Hundred Years of Solitude has long been one of my favorite books of all time. The repetition of names ties in to his presentation of time as cyclical. As Ursula Buendia said at one point, "It's as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning."
! I tried to read this book ages ago when I was in high school (which my age at that point may have contributed to my opinion of it, admittedly). I liked the concept and the sense of adventure but I agree, I wish there were different names. It got too confusing for me; I couldn't keep up with who was who. Plus, I got through the first couple of generations and I thought... there's a hundred years of this? I wanted to go back and finish it at one point, but I lost the book.... No idea where it is now.
I read it and I liked it, but my favourite book of him is "Love in Time of Cholera"