YMMV / One Hundred Years of Solitude

• Harsher in Hindsight: Knowing now that Gabriel García Márquez suffered from senile dementia and could no longer write near the end of his life makes the insomnia plague parts a bit of a cringe to read.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the characters' nicknames is Meme. It's pronounced differently in English, but it still looks hilarious on text. Ironically, the pronunciation of the two words are the same in the original Spanish.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Cease, cows! Life is short!"
  • "The earth is round, like an orange."
• Nightmare Fuel: Full of this stuff, especially towards the end like Ursula shrinking to the size of a fetus, and the last Buendia baby being eaten by ants.
• One-Scene Wonder: One of the book's greatest strengths is how characters who appear for just a few pages manage to make a lasting impact. Of note is Camila "The Elephant" Sagastume, a Big Beautiful Woman who only appears for a few paragraphs to challenge Aureliano Segundo to an eating contest, then disappears from the narrative.
  • The poor Candida Eréndira, who is forced to prostitute herself by her own grandmother after an accident which led to their home burning down. She briefly appears in Macondo. Her story only gets fleshed out in Gabriel García Márquez's short story collection The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother.
• Signature Line: The opening line.
  "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
• Squick:
  • It's mentioned that Úrsula's fear of consummating her marriage to her cousin/husband José Arcadio Buendia was caused by her learning how inbreeding in the family led to its members giving birth to iguanas
  • Rebeca has a habit eating dirt and whitewash. Even when the Buendias have broken this habit of hers, she still occasionally falls back into it when she's very emotionally stressed.
  • Colonel Aureliano Buendia marries Remedios, who is a little girl. Sure, she's Wise Beyond Her Years, but that doesn't change the fact that she was a child when she married the much older Colonel.
  • Aureliano Babilonia and Amaranta passionately make love in whichever room they can find ...all while ants slowly destroy their house, causing their lives to be endangered at one point in their lovemaking.
  • The ants come into play again when it's revealed that the last Aureliano died from being devoured by them.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Among other things, such as Colonel Aureliano Buendia marrying the literal child that is Remedios, the Romani characters are referred to exclusively as gypsies, which is nowadays considered an outright slur.
    • The spanish word "Gitano", is a case of this in Real Life. While sharing the same roots than the word "Gypsy", it doesn't share its negative connotations and is used by Spanish speaking Romani to refer to themselves.
  • Pilar Ternera seducing (and getting pregnant by) a teenaged José Arcadio.

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