Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude
This book is on my reading list, but it took a huge hit after I read The Old Gringo and found it to be a huge pile of crap. No offense meant, it could have easily been due to a horrendous translation.
In any case, the translator was afraid to change the syntax too much and have to reconstruct Fuentes complicated meaning and style herself, so she ended up just recreating it, but it was utterly impossible to follow. There were so many places I ahd to stop as a reader because so many sentences didn't make grammatical sense in English. It was also difficult to follow, wordy, and very overdone.
I was rather shocked to think how Ambrose Bierce would have liked having been turned into a rather mushy, romantic, hero who likes to speak about all his deepest feelings and loves in long uninterrupted monologue. The novel itself does a poor job at integrating the supernatural elements with the storyline, in fact it does a rather poor job at narration in general.
I've rarely found a novel so bewildering. Then again no novel I've ever come across starts a sentence with one point of view, changes to another one midway, and ends with another one, leaving the reader thoroughly confused as to who the hell is the narrator by the end. It's a long droning book about love, war, Mexico and revolution, with a few occassional interesting to say but they are few and far between and do not make up for the mush.
I can't say of a novel that disappointed me more, I really can't, other than maybe when I first picked up a Cormac McCarthy book, Blood Meridian, with excitement, expecting to love it too...
So being that it came from a celebrated Latin American Magical realist, I'm skeptical about being disappointed by 100 Years as well. Afterall, The General in His Labyrinth was readable, but it didn't thrill me. It also dealt with the problem of strange convoluted sentences that didn't quite seem grammatically correct, but mainly it was just a book that suffered in it's own myriads of boredom and weak character work.