13 The Best Books by Gabriel García Márquez

The works of Gabriel García Márquez must have been heard of by many lovers of the classics of twentieth-century literature. His works are novels and novels in the genre of magical realism, which involves the integration of mystical techniques and elements in real life. He has also been involved in politics and journalism, which has put a strain on the writing.

Rating of the best books by Gabriel García Márquez

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.9

At the top of the ranking of the best books by Gabriel García Márquez is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is so multifaceted and profound, raising pressing social issues of Lantine America, and indeed the world, that critics and readers have awarded the work high marks.

The action takes place in the Colombian fictional settlement town of Macondo, centered on the Buendia clan. This is a family in whose lives miracles are performed daily, and they are the order of the day, no one pays attention to the unusual. The family name clan is multifaceted in personality: righteous and sinners, adventurers, heroes, revolutionaries–the story intertwines the fates of relatives with different visions of the world throughout their town’s existence from beginning to end. Despite the large number of characters, each of them is destined by fate to be alone – a kind of “cross” of the Buendia family. The passions are twisted like a Latin American TV series, which makes up 20 chapters of the novel.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” must be read meaningfully. Not everyone can grasp the thread of the plot because of the intertwining of the destinies of so many characters. The novel does not relate directly to reality, but vividly demonstrates the way of life and history of Latin America.

Love in the Time of the Plague

Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.8

The original title of the novel is Love in the Time of Cholera.

The novel raises such a false question in everyone’s life, as first love. The beautiful Fermina rejected her childhood friend Fiorentino Aris, who loved her dearly, and at 21 she married Dr. Juvenal Urbino, whose dream was to find a cure and protection against the plague (or cholera, depending on the translation) of the Middle Ages. A scholar’s way of life is extremely rational, Urbino was not distinguished by emotionality and passion, unlike the rejected Aris, whose soul is full of romanticism, unappreciated by the heroine.

Fermina did not expect her husband to be unfaithful – he confessed to adultery shortly before his death. After the death of Urbino, the widowed woman at the time again turns her attention to Fiorentino, who all these years had not lost hope and waited for the favor of his only love. The passion between them erupted, but its quality was different from youthful infatuation – now it was a conscious romance of mature people.

A couple goes on a cruise on Aris’s ship, and to avoid unnecessary customs inspections, they hang a flag on deck indicating the plague (cholera) patients on the ship. Because of him, they won’t be allowed to go home, so Fiorentino and Fermina go on a new journey.

Autumn of the patriarch

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.8

In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes in grotesque form the life of a Latin American dictator, President, the embodiment of the collective image of all tyrants who rule in Latin America.

The reader focuses on one of the dictators of a fictional country named Sacarias, whose mother was a poor poultry. He has been in power for many years, no longer remembers how he came to rule – he was made president by English sailors. The author presents him in a phantasmagoric guise, combining a ruler, an incarnation of God, simultaneously a puppet in the hands of the Rock, a thunderbolt of the living, while simultaneously waiting and fearing death himself. He is a legend, the embodiment of perfect power, with the image created somewhat comical and not to the point of rhetoric.

The narrative is full of stories about the life of the ruler, his fate is formed by gossip and legends, often deliberately opposed to each other, so that the reader wonders where fiction and what really happened to the hero.

The eyes of the blue dog

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.7

On the fourth place of the rating is the novel “Blue Dog Eyes,” which was included in the anthology of the same name.

One day He and She met. He was impressed by her eyes, which he compared to the eyes of a blue dog. A man is on death’s doorstep, and she began to write “Blue Dog Eyes” everywhere to make him remember her. This woman turned into a cat, and Negro Nabo will do anything to make the angels wait a little. In the process of encountering the novel, the reader will pose many questions, in search of answers to which he will relish the work until the very end.

The action unfolds in the fantasy town of Macondo, when the rainy season arrives – that’s when incredible and mysterious events happen in it.

The House of Buendia

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.7

This rating includes a collection of small works by Gabriel García Márquez written between 1940 and 1980. This time span reveals the author’s growth over 40 years, the motley nature of the stories in terms of different ages; the stories are not alike, the characters and their fates are different.

The collection includes the well-known stories “Siesta Tuesday,” as if torn chapter from “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Artificial Roses” and others, a total of 34 multidimensional stories. Readers will also be interested in the sketch about the visit to Russia, a satirical sketch by Marquez, with a Nobel lecture (recall the author is the winner of the prestigious prize), with monologues about Borges.

The book stirs up various emotions from joy to deep sadness and opens up the possibility of evaluating one’s own life from different angles.

Fallen Leaves

Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.7

Another title for the novel Fallen Leaves. This is the first story about the fictional town of Macondo, which is mentioned in many of Marquez’s works. This is also where Colonel Aureliano Buendia first appears.

The title of the novel speaks eloquently about loneliness and oblivion, typical of the work of Marquez. A quarter century of life in the city is represented by the memories of Colonel Aureliano and his family. At the same time, it is hard to say that only sad events occur in Macondo, quite a few funny stories, dramatic and striking to the core.

Behind love the inevitability of death

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.7

Senator Onesimo Sanchez, six months before his death, meets the woman of his life. Laura Farina is sent to him by her father. She now occupies the senator’s life and means more to him than the coming election. The election campaign is not so interesting now, especially in anticipation of his predicted demise due to illness. Death puts everything in its place, tearing away all the masks, and forces to summarize.

The novel’s emphasis is on politics and its falsity in terms of sincerity and often – common sense. The senator, even knowing that time is short, being in power and feeling his own power, wants everything and at once.

Of love and other demons

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.6

Love, despite the loneliness and drudgery of life in Marquez’s works, is present in each story in varying degrees and quality. The novel “Of Love and Other Demons” was no exception. Maria, the young and beautiful Marquise, turned out to be possessed by demons-at least, she gave that impression, for which she was imprisoned in a convent for purification. To exorcise foreign entities from her body, young priest Caetano takes up the cause.

But the plot takes an unexpected turn – between Maria and Caetano, a love, a passion that cannot be exorcised by either fasting or prayer.

“When they bring fire to gunpowder, don’t expect good things” – this Spanish proverb characterizes the novel “Of Love and Other Devils”.

A trace of your blood in the snow

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.6

The “Twelve Stranger Stories” series includes the story “A Trace of Your Blood in the Snow,” known throughout the world.

Nena Daconte and Billy Sanchez, who were married a few days ago, take a trip from Marseilles to France in a brand-new gifted Mustang. The couple enjoys each other, Nena is two months pregnant. Everything changes by a fateful accident – at a business reception, a young wife injures her finger with a rose thorn from a gift bouquet. The bleeding doesn’t stop throughout the journey, leaving a trail in the snow by which to find Nena and Billy, as she herself joked. The wound did not close, the girl had to go to doctors. Nena stays in the hospital, and Billy can only visit her on Tuesday at a certain time, which is six days later.

It’s a short story that can be read in the same breath in an hour.

The Dangerous Adventures of Miguel Littin in Chile

Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.5

The book “The Dangerous Adventures of Miguel Littin in Chile” is based on the real-life journey of Miguel Littin, a Chilean filmmaker, back home after being expelled by the Pinochet regime. Not surprisingly, the ruler forbade the distribution of the work in the country and ordered the destruction of all the copies that came in.

Littin returned to Chile illegally to make a film about the destruction of the country during the years of Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship. The resulting film, “The Universal Declaration of Chile,” won a prize at the Venice Film Festival. It shows real life in a state the world knew little about, and in part makes a revelation, as the political military regime involves hiding many aspects of what is going on inside the country.

The book “The Dangerous Adventures of Miguel Littin in Chile” contains not only risky moments for the director’s life, but also other stories set in the spirit of adventurous prose.

A cursed time

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.5

Once again, Macondo, the symbol of the province of Latin America in the works of Marquez. “Cursed Time” or “An Unkind Hour” immerses the reader in the world of a fictional town where events repeat day after day, season after season, year after year. They are full of marvels to which no one pays any attention due to their ordinariness… Passion boils as in the traditional genre of Latin American serials. One day everything changes: someone appears in town, posting flyers on the streets with information about the vices of the townspeople in all the colors and details.

Kidnapping Story

Author of the book: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.5

The novel “The Story of the Abduction” is atypical for Márquez in terms of the dynamism of the plot – here the emphasis is not on reasoning and descriptions, but on the development of events, almost like a detective story. In the early 90’s Pablo Escobar, in the company of no less noble drug lords, kidnapped a group of famous journalists. These people were needed by the mafia as an exchange card – the kidnappers offered the authorities the lives of nine journalists in exchange for a reversal of the decision to deport several influential members of the drug gang to the United States to serve life sentences. Blackmail gone wrong. Then the husband of one of the kidnapped journalists intervenes – he becomes an intermediary between the drug lords and the Government.

The General in his labyrinth

Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rating: 4.5

We conclude our rating with a novel about a historical dictatorship, “The General in his Maze”. It is about Signor Bolivar, the liberator general of the Spanish colonies in Latin America. Marquez recounts the life of a once brilliant leader after his retirement from the army. By the way, according to official data, historians know almost nothing about Bolivar’s late biography.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, using magical realism, forms the legend of the brilliant warlord, using individual known facts, transforms them into truth and myths, which the reader will have to divide for himself. Bolivar’s symbolic journey along the river becomes a stroll down the road of memories, a summation of the journey to the world that awaits everyone after death.