Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is the novel I find hardest to recommend because the things that make it extraordinary are the things that make it difficult. The prose is deliberately hyperbolic — events happen that cannot happen, characters live for implausible lengths, the same names recur across generations in ways designed to confuse you. This is not failure of realism. It is a different epistemology.

The Buendía family's repetitions — characters who seem to be the same character in different generations — are an argument about history. Families repeat themselves. Societies repeat themselves. The cycles of war and peace and founding and decay are the actual subject, and the magical elements are the expression of what it feels like to be inside cycles that are too large to see clearly.

The ending is the correct ending for a novel about repetition and inevitability.