content: Marquez' book takes the reader through the lives and times of what I hope is an atypical Columbian (?) family, covering from roughly the 1830s to the 1930s. It was fun in parts, but oddly repetitive, with a style that seemed half magic realism, half Freud. And, of course, the standard enervating anti-American diatribes were thrown in. I guess a Latin American author even in magic realism mode can't overcome his predilictions.