The prose of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is spell-binding and delightful. This work won the Nobel for literature, I think in 1982. I am terribly proud to say that I bought my first copy in 1977, in the city of Salamanca, Spain. I was trying to learn Spanish, and a Panamanian guy told me to read that book and look up every word I did not understand. I think I have now read it 6 or 7 times. I still have my original copy, nearly 30 years old and well thumbed, and an Argentinian buddy of mine is reading it downstairs from where I am sitting right now.

The work of this outstanding Colombian author is now studied in universities across the globe, and his style is termed "magical realism". Why is it magical? Because it is highly original, imaginative, and unprecedented. Why is it realism? Because you find yourself believing the most improbable things as they are described in meticulous detail. For example, someone can go on a journey, and not be seen for several years, but then come home "one Thursay morning when it was raining heavily". (And you subconsciously think, - how did the narrator know it was Thursday, or what the weather was like, unless it is true?")

Initially, we are introduced to Col. Aureliano Buendia, and his thoughts as he faces the firing squad go back to a childhood memory, of the first time he saw ice (brought by a tribe of wandering gipsies), and thought it was a huge diamond. But then you see that he can not have died, because years later, he is remembering the moment of having that memory. Games with time, the labythrine thought process of a genius. Aureliano's parents, the larger-than-life Jose Arcadio Buendia, and his wise, practical and down-to-earth mother, Ursula, wander through the tropical jungles with a little group of friends and found a village miles from anywhere. This village will become Macondo, the scene for all the other actions to follow. Macondo in founded in a pristine age when "things were so new that some of them had not even been named yet".

A central character (among so many as to compare with the cast of War and Peace) is the gipsy, Melquiades. Melquiades is ancient, and "Death has been sniffing at the turn-ups of his trousers for years", but still his time has not come. He ends up living the last years of his life in the house of the Buendia family, where he secrets himself in a tiny study, and writes a manuscript in the little letters of an unknown alphabet, so they look "like clothes drying on a washing line". Long after the eventual deaths of the founders of Macondo, one of their descendants discovers that the script is Sanskrit, and devotes half a life-time to translating the parchments of Melquiades.

One of the most charming qualities of this book is that you can pick it up and allow it to fall open at any random page, read that one page only, and still enjoy it for the imagery, the sheer beauty with which everything is described and narrated.

There is a little secret to the style of this novel, which is that it has almost no examples of an adverb of qualification....(those words which in English would end with -ly). You would think that this would detract from the descriptiveness, but it doesn't. Instead, it makes the narration seem un-rehearsed and spontaneous.

I heard once that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was asked in an interview, how long it took him to write 100 years, and he said "all my life".

T.S. Eliot perceived culture like a river... the headwaters were the ancient Greeks, people like Homer, Hesiod, Sappho and everything that came later was flavoured by what had gone before. So Virgil was shaped by Homer, and Dante by Virgil and so on, up to the present time. In the 20th Century you can see the influence of Garcia Marquez in the works of the Chilean, Isabel Allende or the Spaniard, Ruiz Zafon. It would be hard to write anything (I think) after reading 100 years of solitude without leaving traces of the influence of that experience.

However wonderful the story may be, the reader is not really able to evaluate the whole work until right at the end. There is a surprise in store, which makes everything click into place, like those Chinese puzzle boxes with little sliding panels, so that you can not open them until you have moved all these tiny components in exactly the right sequence. Only then does the whole architecture of the work become apparent. You will put it down and go "wow" (or something similar.)

When I bought my first copy, it had an extra sticker on the cover that said, "inolvidable" (unforgettable). That was 30 years ago. I rest my case.