Gabriel García Márquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

[heidiadonis]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

I loved that book. As you see, I have my signature quote from the book.
It was fantastic and mystical yet descriptive of any human lives. I felt, then, I have never read anything like it. The blood oozing miles and miles or the longest quilt that may as well carry the length of a person's life! If no one encourages me to continue my current book, I may pick up Love in the Time of Cholera.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

If no one encourages me to continue my current book, I may pick up Love in the Time of Cholera.

Go ahead! Love in the Time of Cholera is almost as good as One Hundred Years of Solitude. Definitely Garcia Marquez's best two books.

 

[Manuel76]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Kind of book which impressed me while I was reading it, but which memory fades once you finish the last page. Its prose is so beautiful that you just keep reading.

Not at all boring but I find it overrated. And after 200 pages you can find it repetitive (intended so I suppose) and mechanical.

I find Marquez overrated, he's the most famous writer of the Boom (perhaps with Borges) and it's a pity that much better writers and novels are far less known, as Conversaci?n en la Catedral by Vargas Llosa or Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo.

I don't like that realismo m?gico as understood by Marquez, where once every ten pages you see birds raining or a woman flying or anything like that. I prefer Realismo magico as intended by for example by Carpentier, when suddenly atmosphere changes and time colapse and everything gets magical, but at the same time everything is still the same. Magic as a kind of new look at everyday life which trascends time and space. Carpentier did it great in El siglo de las luces o Los pasos perdidos.

 

[Stiffelio]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

I find Marquez overrated, he's the most famous writer of the Boom (perhaps with Borges)

Manuel, allow me to correct your statement. Borges does not belong to the Boom as such. He was already famous much earlier and independently from the Boom movement. His main productive period dates from the 40's and 50's. All the Boom writers were brought up reading Borges, but that's another story...

 

[Heteronym]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

I don't like that realismo m?gico as understood by Marquez, where once every ten pages you see birds raining or a woman flying or anything like that.

I think people overstate the importance of magical realism in his work. He popularised it in One Hundred Years of Solitude and his early works are full of it, but No One Writes to the Colonel, The General in his Labyrinth, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, Memories of my Melancholy Whores are naturalistic, if memory serves me.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Manuel, allow me to correct your statement. Borges does not belong to the Boom as such. He was already famous much earlier and independently from the Boom movement. His main productive period dates from the 40's and 50's. All the Boom writers were brought up reading Borges, but that's another story...

That is correct, we cannot include Borges as a "Boom" writer. On the contrary I can see that the new movements in Spanish language that opposes to the Boom, have plenty of Borgers characteristics (Bola?o, Vila-Matas, Toscana, Aira) meaning that he had little to do with the main topics of the Boom.
There are also writers included at the Boom because they were located at the same time, but their works are totally different from all of them.
Onetti is a good example.

 

[Manuel76]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Thanks Stiffelio,I agree Borges had already written some of his most important works before the Boom but I thought he only became really famous with the boom period.

He wasn't really famous during the 40s. He was a discovery from the 60s. Till then he remained almost unknown outside the spanish literary world. In the 60 he received his first important international award which drew attention to his earlier writings. He begun to be translated and published in other languages.

The boom was more than anything a marketing phenomenon, and only made sense because of some publishers which decided to promote a new literature, it's more about when than about how (more when you published than which was your style). Try to find similar characteristics in those writers makes sense? (and of course there were similar characteristics) Borges didn't start writting during the Boom, but he certainly became famouse at that time and partly because of that.

Anyway thaks for the correction, Stiffelio and Daniel, because I think that's right.

 

[Manuel76]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Heteronim, I was refering to realismo magico in Cien a?os de soledad, not in other Marquez books. In this book is a constant, fro the first page till the last.

Anyway that's his best considered work and very representative of an important part of his work, without it he wouldn't be as known as he is.

I would like to say that I prefer other very different books like El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, but that wouldn't be true (I coudn't even finish it, and deing so short...)

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Heteronim, I was refering to realismo magico in Cien a?os de soledad, not in other Marquez books. In this book is a constant, fro the first page till the last.

Anyway that's his best considered work and very representative of an important part of his work, without it he wouldn't be as known as he is.

I would like to say that I prefer other very different books like El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, but that wouldn't be true (I coudn't even finish it, and deing so short...)

I could define Marquez as two separate writers, one of the best novelists I've ever read or the second one, a really mediocre author, whose novels are just plain and boring going from regular to bad.

In the first one I'd have to put, Cien A?os de Soledad, El Amor en los Tiempos del C?lera, Cr?nica de una Muerte Anunciada, Del Amor y otros Demonios, and some stories from Extra?os Doce Cuentos Peregrinos.

On the other hand there are tedious and plain novels like El Coronel no tiene quien le Escriba, Los Funerales de Mam? Grande, Relato de un N?ufrago, Noticias de un Secuestro and finally the huge plagiarism Memoria de mis Putas Tristes.

It's a strange situation, since most of the writers tend to have a certain quality in the majority of his works, not too distant from each other. For me, this one is not the case.

 

[Stiffelio]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Manuel, it's hard to make definitive categories in literature, about periods, movements, themes. It's true that the Boom was mostly a marketing gimmick and that, although many so-called Boom writers did have similar stylistic and thematic characteristics, others were just lumped into the Boom category for the sake of marketing alone (e.g. Onetti). Arguably, the "official kick-off" date of the Boom was late in 1967 when "A Hundred Years of Solitude" was published. By that time, Borges was already pretty wel known and had most of his oeuvre translated into at least English and French, and had many scholars worldwide studying him. So I think Borges owes very little to the Boom, except perhaps a reinforcement of the awareness created by the fact that some Boom writers took Borges as their inspiration (even if none of them actually wrote anything similar to Borges in style or content).

 

[Heteronym]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

...and finally the huge plagiarism Memoria de mis Putas Tristes.

Whom did he plagiarise?

 

[Manuel76]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

But Stiffelio, 1967!!! that's too late. I mean, no Rayuela? or La muerte de Artemio Cruz. La ciudad y los perros!!

I just read in Wikipedia and they talk about 1960 more or less, the reasons seemed to me quite convincing.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

Whom did he plagiarise?

Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties

 

[Stiffelio]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

But Stiffelio, 1967!!! that's too late. I mean, no Rayuela? or La muerte de Artemio Cruz. La ciudad y los perros!!

I just read in Wikipedia and they talk about 1960 more or less, the reasons seemed to me quite convincing.

To follow up on your argument from your previous post, Rayuela, Artemio... and Ciudad..., brilliant novels as they were, were popular mostly in their respective countries. I mean, other than amongst the Boom writers (who oftentimes exchanged manuscripts between each other), the ordinary reader in, say, Mexico had not read Rayuela, and very few people in Argentina had even heard of Carlos Fuentes or Vargas Llosa. And nobody in Europe or the States were familiar with any of the three (except for Cort?zar who lived in France and was pretty well known there). It was only after "Hurricane Gabo" came along with One Hundred Years... that all these guys began surfacing up in the world readers' consciousness. The history of the Boom is not that simple. There's a lot written about it. I'll try to dig up a few articles and let you know.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

To follow up on your argument from your previous post, Rayuela, Artemio... and Ciudad..., brilliant novels as they were, were popular mostly in their respective countries. I mean, other than amongst the Boom writers (who oftentimes exchanged manuscripts between each other), the ordinary reader in, say, Mexico had not read Rayuela, and very few people in Argentina had even heard of Carlos Fuentes or Vargas Llosa. And nobody in Europe or the States were familiar with any of the three (except for Cort?zar who lived in France and was pretty well known there). It was only after "Hurricane Gabo" came along with One Hundred Years... that all these guys began surfacing up in the world readers' consciousness. The history of the Boom is not that simple. There's a lot written about it. I'll try to dig up a few articles and let you know.

Interesting discussion. Maybe we should create a thread about the Latin American Boom: History, writers etc.

 

[Jan Mbali]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

To my recollection, the mosty glorious image has got to be the heroic eating competion, where the woman collapses, screaming " I'm stuffed!" . But this swims in a sea of images from other works set in or from South America. B Traven. Neruda. Cuban and Mexican and Brazilian films and art. Not having been there I see things through spectacles that are inevitably full of stereoptypes. The latin patriotism and the fights for independence, the colonialism and thrust and blend of cultures. Oppression and slavery, revolt. The amazing history. Its all real and its all magic in the hands of great artisits who are soaked in that history and spirit. Can one judge such works out of that context on the overuse of magical realism? Or am I being hopelessly sentimental and uncritical?

 

[Raphael Lambach]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

As I've seen, One Hundred Years of Solitude was first meeting with Garc?a Marqu?z work - and I won't lie it was also my first reading of the author's book. IMO, One Hundred.. is a portrait of universe, I mean, Macondo represents the world with its values, morality and all feelings that make part of human beings. The intimistic aspect of this writing is based in the mix of reality and fantasy. Although Marqu?z friendship with Fidel Castro - really near the worship -along this book the reader you're gonna find a reference to a man who tried revolutionary actions for 32 times - and all of them this man was defeated.

I do believe One Hundred Years of Solitude is more than only a book: pay attention on details, pay attention as all characters have your own personality and way of living.

 

[waalkwriter]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

I think people overstate the importance of magical realism in his work. He popularised it in One Hundred Years of Solitude and his early works are full of it, but No One Writes to the Colonel, The General in his Labyrinth, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, Memories of my Melancholy Whores are naturalistic, if memory serves me.

The General In His Labyrinth makes multiple uses of magical realism, from the backdrop, to the preternatural ancient age of Bolivar, (who is truly portrayed as ancient, crippled, dying at every moment, ripped with fever, symbolically, yet still staying alive, not merely as sickly), and there are little details here and there through the book that are not neccessarily supernatural, but sort of beyond normal reality.

 

[waalkwriter]

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.

 

[peter_d]

Re: Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez: One Hundred Years Of Solitude

I read 100 Y.o.S. for the first time without any expectations. I was very ignorant about literature and hardly knew anything about GGM other than that had won the Nobel somewhere in the 1980s.

The book truly amazed me. It was the best I had ever read until then. It was the book that sucked me into literature in general. Just the idea that one man could create that kind of reality with just a typewriter and a pile of paper... I found it incredible. Today I still cherish it. I?ve reread it 5 or 6 times, and everytime I discovered something new. I think the magic that was in it for me will never go away. It?s on my list of 5 best books I ever read and I think it will stay there forever.

Of the other books of GGM that I have read I particularly liked
- Chronicle of a death foretold
- Love in times of cholera
- About love and other demons
(in that order)

Good luck with the 100 YoS, Waalkwriter, I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.