One Hundred Years of Solitude

I have had this book on my shelf for the last four years at least and I have never picked it up. On Tuesday I finally decided that I would give it a shot...after all, it is a Nobel Prize winner, so I thought it would be worth a read.

So far, here's what I have: there's this guy (Jose) who lives in this village and gypsies come...and he buys stuff from them because he thinks the things will do things the gypsies say they won't do--but he buys them anyway and pisses off his wife (Ursula). He has two sons...one of them (also Jose) sleeps with an older woman (Pilar), gets her pregnant, but then he sleeps with a gypsy woman and then he runs away with the gypsies...Ursula, although just giving birth to a daughter, leaves town for five months and finds another group of people and brings them back to her village--but they bring with them and insomnia sickness that causes them to forget everything--so Jose labels everything with its name and what its function is (like this is a cow, she needs to be milked each morning)...while the sickness is spreading, his other son (Aureliano...who has never known a woman) pays 20 cents to sleep with a girl who has to sleep with 70 men a night for ten more years to pay off her grandmothers house (that she burnt down by accident because she lit too many candles). Aureliano feels sorry for her and just pays another 20 cents so she doesn't have to sleep with another guy...and he leaves (without sleeping with her) and the next morning he decides he is going to propose to her so she won't have to live the horrible life that she is living...but she has left...so he mopes around and eventually sleeps with the same woman his brother slept with (and got pregnant...before he ran off with the gypsies)...

...confused yet?

Me, too.