''Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn't die when he should but when he can." 
 *4.75 stars 
 Pure magic- that is the most precise way to describe this brilliant book. 
 One Hundred Years of Solitude is considered by many as Marquez's masterpiece and that alone says a lot- after all the man won a Nobel Prize. The novel tells the story of Macondo, a fictional town in Latin America, through the history of the Buendia family. The Buendias, generation after generation witnessed the rise, the glory and the fall of the mythical town they called home. In their joys and their sorrows, in their fears and their passions, one sees all of humankind, in all of her tragicomical glory. And in the history and myths of Macondo, the reader sees all of Latin America. 
 This is a story about what it means to be a human being, about the good as well as the bad parts. Love, lust and joy are eternally intertwined with pain, failure and the avarice of death. While reading, you will find yourself laughing out loud as well as mourning in silence, because Marquez manages to capture perfectly every aspect of the human heart and his characters feel real, even when their stories seem quite over-the- top. But that is after all what magical realism is about- making the reader believe that a man can be chased by yellow butterflies wherever he may go, that magic carpets not only exist, but are hardly more remarkable than a huge chunk of ice, and that beautiful girls sometimes do ascent to heavens before their families' hardly surprised eyes. 
 Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the most gifted writers I've come across. His stories come to life in front of the reader. He hardly writes books; he creates a work of art, he paints pictures but instead of brushes he uses words. Sometimes he can be a bit overly dramatic, and that is the reason why I never feel one hundred percent connected with any of his characters, but the enjoyment of reading his books never ceases. 
 One Hundred Years of Solitude is not the tale of the forlorn Colonel Aureliano Buendia, who organised thirty-two uprisings and lost each one of them, as well as his heart and feelings. Neither is it the story of Ursula Buendia who witnessed her town's glory and decay, as well as her family's. It's not a story about the life of Remedios, for whom men died nor about the struggles of Aureliano Segundo who married the most beautiful woman in the world only to realise that he would never love anyone more than his mistress. This is an accounting of the history of the human race, of all the time that was and that will be- because one thing is certain; time is moving in a cirle.