100 Years of Solitude is like a grand symphony because the reader can enjoy it on many levels. When my mother read it a few years ago with her book club, she was given 100 pages of notes on the novel and expected to know all the relationships and how each character relates to every other character. I know that some people love doing this to novels, but in the end, she didn't really find it enjoyable the way I did.
Before writing novels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote for newspapers. There, he learned how to write short pieces that people could get information and enjoyment out of. The texture of his novels, in that vein, is very complex. You can pick almost any two pages at random and enjoy them as a mini-story within the novel. When I read Love in the Time of Cholera, I was struck by how funny it was. 100 Years of Solitude is funny and fun as well, but in a different way. Needless to say, I loved it.
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