2006 Reading List - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Book Seventeen
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Huh? Wha.... Oh. Oh, man. Wow.
I had the weirdest dream.
There was this little town, right? And everybody had, like, the same two names. And there was this guy who lived under a tree and a lady who ate dirt and some other guy who just made little gold fishes all the time. And sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn't, and.... and there were fire ants everywhere, and some girl got carried off into the sky by her laundry....
Wow. That was fucked up.
I need some coffee.
That was roughly how I felt after reading this book. This is the only time I've ever read a book and thought, "This would be awesome if I was stoned."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which is such a fun name to say) is one of those writers that You Should Read. You get some bonus intellectual points or something, the kind of highbrow cachet that just doesn't come with Stephen King. My co-worker, and Wikipedia, say that Garcia was one of the first people to use magical realism, a style in which the fantastic and unbelievable are treated as everyday occurrences. This is certainly the case in this book, and it's part of what gives it such a dreamlike quality - Colonel Aureliano Buendia has seventeen illegitimate sons, all named Aureliano, by seventeen women, and they all come to his house on the same day. Remedios the Beauty is so beautiful that men waste away in front of her, but she doesn't even notice. The twins Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo may, in fact, have switched identities when they were children, but nobody knows for sure, not even them. In the small town of Macondo, weird things happen all the time, and nobody really notices. Or if they do notice that, for example, the town's patriarch has been living tied to a chestnut tree for the last twenty years, nobody thinks anything unusual about it.
Another element to the dreaminess is that there's really no story here. Reading this book is kind of like playing a really weird game of The Sims - it's about a family, which keeps getting bigger, and things happen to everybody. So, the narrator moves around from one character to another, giving them their moment for a little while, and then moving on to someone else, very smoothly and without much fanfare. There's very little dialogue, so the focus of the story can shift very easily, and often does. Each character has their stories, but you're not allowed to linger on anyone for very long before Garcia shows you what's happening to someone else. The result is one long, continuous narrative about this large and ultimately doomed family, wherein the Buendia family is the main character and the various family members are secondary to that.
It's certainly an interesting book, and took a while to get through. Honestly, I kept dozing off, which is very unusual for me. I think it's time for a fluff break - some simple and easy reading to cleanse my mental palate. I may try Garcia again at some point, since I know what to expect now. Just not anytime soon....
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Huh? Wha.... Oh. Oh, man. Wow.
I had the weirdest dream.
There was this little town, right? And everybody had, like, the same two names. And there was this guy who lived under a tree and a lady who ate dirt and some other guy who just made little gold fishes all the time. And sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn't, and.... and there were fire ants everywhere, and some girl got carried off into the sky by her laundry....
Wow. That was fucked up.
I need some coffee.
That was roughly how I felt after reading this book. This is the only time I've ever read a book and thought, "This would be awesome if I was stoned."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which is such a fun name to say) is one of those writers that You Should Read. You get some bonus intellectual points or something, the kind of highbrow cachet that just doesn't come with Stephen King. My co-worker, and Wikipedia, say that Garcia was one of the first people to use magical realism, a style in which the fantastic and unbelievable are treated as everyday occurrences. This is certainly the case in this book, and it's part of what gives it such a dreamlike quality - Colonel Aureliano Buendia has seventeen illegitimate sons, all named Aureliano, by seventeen women, and they all come to his house on the same day. Remedios the Beauty is so beautiful that men waste away in front of her, but she doesn't even notice. The twins Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo may, in fact, have switched identities when they were children, but nobody knows for sure, not even them. In the small town of Macondo, weird things happen all the time, and nobody really notices. Or if they do notice that, for example, the town's patriarch has been living tied to a chestnut tree for the last twenty years, nobody thinks anything unusual about it.
Another element to the dreaminess is that there's really no story here. Reading this book is kind of like playing a really weird game of The Sims - it's about a family, which keeps getting bigger, and things happen to everybody. So, the narrator moves around from one character to another, giving them their moment for a little while, and then moving on to someone else, very smoothly and without much fanfare. There's very little dialogue, so the focus of the story can shift very easily, and often does. Each character has their stories, but you're not allowed to linger on anyone for very long before Garcia shows you what's happening to someone else. The result is one long, continuous narrative about this large and ultimately doomed family, wherein the Buendia family is the main character and the various family members are secondary to that.
It's certainly an interesting book, and took a while to get through. Honestly, I kept dozing off, which is very unusual for me. I think it's time for a fluff break - some simple and easy reading to cleanse my mental palate. I may try Garcia again at some point, since I know what to expect now. Just not anytime soon....