Carlos Fuentes was a novelist and essayist from Mexico. Mr. Fuentes was an influential force in Latin literature, garnering many awards and much praise

He was born in Aracataca because his grandfather killed a man in a gunfight and fled to this new town, taking his daughter, García Márquez’s mother, with him.

I was intensely interested in English and world literature throughout high school and college. I devoured every classic and newly published novel that I could get my hands on—from Chaucer to Chabon, Rumi to Rushdie. And during that entire time—what I now consider to be my peak reading period—I somehow managed to forgo reading Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s infamous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Sure, I knew that it existed, but there were always other books to conquer. I kept sidelining the tome for other works, until I forgot about it entirely. Buy this book in paper from Amazon.com Years passed before a close friend of mine called me up to tell me of a great book he just read, one that he insisted that I read immediately. Of course the book was One Hundred Years of Solitude; the classic had finally caught up with me. I finished the novel only a few days ago, and I have more than a few things to say about it. Brass tacks plot overview For those of you who haven’t read One Hundred Years of Solitude, here’s a (spoiler free) summary. The entirety of the novel takes place in a town called Macondo in Columbia, a city established by Jose ArcadioBuendia, his wife Ursula, and…