Well, I get totally lost whenever I pick this book "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Every time a character is mentioned, I have to stop for a minute to figure out who exactly he is and why he is doing whatever he is doing. Do you, my dear reader (if there's any), wonder why?? Because they all have same names.
Its a story of many generations of the strangest of families living in a town called Macondo in "the world that was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point." So this family got hold of just two names Arcadio and Aureliano and let them suffice for generations to come. And the children came from so many various sources that it becomes really hard to keep track. Likewise, so many events keep occurring in such abrupt fashion in it that its mind-boggling to remember the sequence.
About the story: it is interesting and funny and strange. It's my first encounter with Magic Realism, a genre where magic elements are a natural part in an otherwise mundane, realistic environment. Things are just going the normal way, well as normal as this strange family can manage, and then suddenly things start flying, people come back from death, at one time, the whole town suffers from insomnia and when they have been awake for months or may be years and have started losing their memory, suddenly they come back to normal.
So I am still reading it, rather slowly. But honestly, I cannot make any sense of events and cannot tell whether the Arcadio and Aureliano being mentioned are son or grandson or great-grandson of the original Arcadio.
The same name problem bugged me, too, but magic realism is such an interesting genre.
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