[!@#$%!]

ha ha ha ha ha yes! the names are a little mind-bending

in general the aurelianos are more philosophical and the jose arcadios more "action men" but over the generations it gets bananas

there's a book of interviews with garcia marquez where he tells the story of a russian reader who started building a genealogical tree of the buendías and wrote him to say that after reading the book she didn't know if she was crazy or if the crazy was garcía márquez.

anyway if you ever come across "los ríos profundos" it's not crazy like that-- the main character is a boy, and a sad one, and you look at the whole world more or less through his eyes, but what it does is it shows you a universe that you haven't seen before, i.e., the andes around the early/middle XX century, with its feudal social structure and the clash or fusion of andean and spanish culture-- and from within, not from the outside, which is the great part about it.