Oh my. A paragon of magical realism and my second favorite author. Rest in peace.
Liking storytelling alone is sometimes not enough to like Marquez, you have to love language too. He uses (some might say abuses) language to impact his storytelling, often using incredibly long, convoluted sentences to weave his narrative. It can be hard to follow, sometimes intentionally, but I find it enormously satisfying to read and follow along with his brain. Like slowly drinking a maple syrup of words.
One of the best examples is the first 15 or so[1] pages of Autumn of the Patriarch[2], where the narrator winds this thread of what has happened slowly, using sentences that span pages, until you realize a shift from what has happened to a sort of what is about to happen. Then a fist slams on the table and the realization strikes you that the first part of the description was a kind of set up, this beautiful ruse. I wish I could be more descriptive but it would give away the delight. It's a great book about terror and despotism.
Marquez is not the kind of thing you can read in a noisy environment. At least I can't. I adore him so much. I could write a eulogy for days.
If you've never read him, please take a moment to read one of my favorite short stories, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
(I've hosted a copy of it (and many more short stories) for ages because most of the copies on the web are plagued with ads and miserable formatting)
If One Hundred Years of Solitude seems too long for you, I urge you to look into some of his very excellent shorter books, such as Autumn but also Of Love and Other Demons[3] and Love in the Time of Cholera.[4]
(Chronicle of a Death Foretold is even shorter, but I do not recommend it as the first Marquez book you read!)
[1] It could be the first 10 or 30 pages, it's been several years, but I am certain it's one of the better (and shorter) examples of his style.
I sorta regret writing that in retrospect because its a somewhat reply-bait thing to write.
But I was thinking of Bohumil Hrabal as my most dear author.
In some respects they are very different, in that Hrabal doesn't quite have the same magical realism bent. But in their writing itself, in their structure, they are often similar: Hrabal also favors extremely long sentences. Hrabal's book Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age is actually just one long run-on sentence that spans 160 pages. Even when Hrabal's sentences are not long, his paragraph breaks are few. It drives some people mad, but I think if you can follow along, it is an immense pleasure to read.
Both of them adore language:
> "Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing through the veins to the root of each blood vessel."
It is so strange that people can have such varied responses to language. By the time my eyes alighted on the period/full-stop after "kilo" I was experiencing a significant amount of anxiety. Which is not to say that I did not enjoy the prose, because once I reached the period I did enjoy the writing. But I do not know if I could enjoy reading a book that contained a lot of marathon sentences.
Speed reading has recently been a thing here on HN, and I think these passages beautifully illustrate the shortcomings of those techniques. I've always been a very fast reader, and it was quite difficult for me to figure out how to appreciate this kind of literature.
I can easily absorb information from man pages, and get a lot of enjoyment out of more intellectual fiction like what Charlie Stross or Alastair Reynolds write, but it's a whole different skill-set to read and enjoy writing like this. Marquez' style really requires you to turn off large parts of your information-processing brain, and just listen to the narration like it was someone else reading a story to you.
Any particular recommendations what to read for someone unfamiliar with Bohumil Hrabal? I just realized I've seen a film based on one of his novels of the same title, 'Closely Watched Trains' (a great film, by the way.)
I'll always love Autumn. I usually keep a small pile of "guiding light" books around, and Autumn has been in there ever since I first read it ~7 years ago. I use them kind of like reference manuals for the craft, kind of like how we might look through the docs off and on as we code. One of my most cherished book piles.
By the end of the first page of Love in the Time of Cholera I was already wondering how amazing the book must be in its original Spanish and how much could be lost in translation.
One Hundred Years of Solitude made me decide to improve my Spanish so I could read it in the orginal language. Still haven't yet :-(
Gregory Rabassa does a phenomenal job with the translation.
My spanish is decent enough to have read a few of Marquez's books in the original language, but not good enough to appreciate them as much as I did in English.
I'd recommend starting with "El Colonel que no Tiene que Escribe". It was used in my AP Spanish class in high school and is short enough so you don't get frustrated with the slow going of reading in a new language.
I didn't mean to sound snob though sorry if it came through like that, I would definitely recommend to read them either in Spanish or English, however you can enjoy them the most. It's just that you'll have to accept that some thing just get lost in translation, I mean, even if your mother tongue is Spanish, you'll miss things.
I, on the other hand, hope that the three men that Marquez's close friend Castro had executed for trying to get to the US on a boat will rest in peace. Not to mention all the dissidents who died in his prisons.
Marquez lived in Cuba and for decades witnessed the daily suffering and poverty of the Cuban people. The endless monitoring of Castro's secret police. The constant rationing of basic necessities (though not for Castro or Marquez, who lived lives of luxury).
He was a master of writing about the lives of the people of Latin America. But he walked the streets of Havana, saw what anyone could see, and never wrote about any of that. Perhaps he was too busy sharing a fine repast with Fidel and Raul to get around to it.
I have no love for Castro (maybe some contempt), but I think Marquez here is approximately as culpable as Shostakovich, which is to say not. He was a writer, not a reporter, and if we try to pull an artist down to the level of politics it's a lose-lose if we're successful.
On one hand, I largely agree with you, about the utility of holding someone responsible for what they didn't do, which would have been at great personal cost.
On the other hand, I believe Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would like to have a word with you. Out back, in the alley.
Seeing your comment downvoted just shows this cliched simpathy for the left that was a fad in the 60's and 70's for anyone who wanted to be perceived as an intellectual (sure it worked to get chix by then); its still kicking and alive it seems. By that time you could sell a scam that steals a nation resources as love for the poor.
But today after we know what happened in Cambodia, Ethiopia, North Korea - to cite a few - under comunist regimes; being a simpathizer of communism just can evidence either ignorance, lack of empathy and sensibility or attachment to an old hungover hipster fad.
That said, I enjoyed reading cien años de soledad but I also know that Macondo would be no better under communist rule.
"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo."
Gracias por esto. Entre otras cosas, la traducción de inglés no puede capturar la sutileza de "había de recordar" o "conocer el hielo". En inglés Aureliano Buendía podía ver el hielo, pero en español podía conocerlo.
Potentially to "experience ice for the first time", but that lacks the romantic-ness of the Spanish original. The problem is that English's "meet" or "know" would cause the reader to double-take, and potentially still not understand the meaning, whereas in Spanish it feels normal.
And many years after reading that book, I have that line memorized in my head.
I also regret not learning Spanish well enough to read his books untranslated as I understand his writing is gorgeous in Spanish. I'm thankful that his books translated well enough into English for me to appreciate his genius. Farewell, Gabo.
Marquez praised the English translation of One Hundred Years, though. I think he said that that was the way he would like to write it, if he had used English.
Incidentally, this is why I really like reading with an e-reader. It's so much easier to get the definition of a word that it makes reading in foreign languages much more pleasant.
"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit."
That line, that one opening line. Once I read it, it was instantly etched into my brain.
I read the book in Spanish. It was the first magic realism book that I read, and also the first book authored by Márquez that I read. I had no idea what the book was about, but that opening line hooked me, and I could not put down the book afterwards.
Unsurprisingly, I tried to read everything else written by Márquez :-)
I've been collecting great opening lines to books. This line has topped the list -- not that I ranked them, but I put it first, followed by "It was inevitable. The scent of bitter almonds always reminded Dr. Juvenal Urbino of the fate of unrequited love." from Love in the Time of Cholera.
On a note of remembrance, many years ago, when I lived in Paris, my friend volunteered at the English Language Library for the Blind there. She told me they valued American accents in the readings there and asked if I would read a book for them. I agreed and decided on Love in the Time of Cholera. The librarian suggested starting with a shorter book, but I loved the book so much I couldn't pick another.
Only after starting it did I realize how much longer it takes to read a book out loud than silently and how much time I had volunteered for them. Still, I finished the book. I still wonder if my reading is still there. I recorded it onto cassette tapes.
Not to be pedantic, but the Rabassa translation reads:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
"Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía habría de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo."
I think rjtavares' quote is more faithful. Except for "conocer", it should be "know ice" or maybe "know about ice", not "see" or "discover".
But the thing about translating poetic literature is that the translator also needs to be a poet.
Sometimes you have to just leave meanings implied to avoid being very discursive. Why would you take a child to see ice? Why would it be significant? "See" doesn't usually carry that connotation of "for the first time", but really the sentence can't possibly mean anything else.
The sentence in English is translated perfectly in this instance - the underlying implication of 'to see ice' carries the exact same meaning as the Spanish.
Not really. "to see ice" in English is more dubious than the phrase in Spanish, as you don't really know whether or not the character is doing it for the first time. A translation closer in meaning would be "to get to know ice".
This whole debate is why the translator chose "discover". It's a bit awkward because it can be interpreted two ways, but in one of the ways it carries the connotation of seeing for the first time, without the lengthy phrase "to get to know" or "to see for the first time" disrupting the rhythm of the prose.
The crux of the problem, of course, is that the word "meet" in English only applies to people.
Don't forget that the translator knows just as well as you or I what the Spanish means - he also understands what it means when you take a child to see something - an expression that almost without exclusion means taking a child to see something for the first time.
"To get to know" takes us further away from the meaning, not closer.
He [Aureliano II ] had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.
So powerful. I did not understand what I had got into until the end. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember how the rubble that world turned into in the last pages just crushed me.
To expand on #3: the "present" in the sentence isn't even taking place before the firing squad, that's "many years later". It places the reader in a timeless moment.
I think another opener that's at least as good is "Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don't know" (even though this is misleading w/o the whole context..)
As much as I like Camus's The Stranger, and am not familiar with Marquez, I still agree with coldtea. In a single opening line (when you know nothing of the rest of the book), Marquez places a beginning (seeing ice) an ending (the firing squad), and makes you want to read more to see what happens in between.
Although that line is memorable I don't think it is beautiful - indeed I rather prefer the opening paragraphs of Espedair Street, which you can read on the wiki page:
Edit - having said that, I think the start of The Crow Road is rather good as that immature desire to shock is rather appropriate for Prentice McHoan - but you can't really tell how appropriate that is until you've read more of the book.
Let's not forget that GGM was a life-long socialist and a supporter of the Cuban revolution.
He spent many years living and Cuba and he considered Castro to be one of his best friends. He was a firm supporter of Chavez, and looked forward to the day that Simon Bolivar's idea of a united Pan-America would be realized. Because of this, he was prohibited from entering the US during the Reagan administration.
As much as I love his works of fiction, my favorite book of his is the first volume of his autobiography, Living to Tell The Tale. I've been patiently waiting for news about volume 2 and 3 ever since the first one came out in 2002. I have never heard anything about these -- whether they were ever written remains a mystery. RIP to a magnificent man who brought so much pride to the people of our scarred continent.
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" was the only book that everyone in my family ever read, me, my wife and my three kids.
"Mr. García Márquez, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote fiction rooted in a mythical Latin American landscape of his own creation, but his appeal was universal. His books were translated into dozens of languages. He was among a select roster of canonical writers — Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway among them — who were embraced both by critics and by a mass audience." from the article.
But the article doesnt begin to do the book justice. The mythology is Colombian but it all is real to the reader. It is very worthwnile to read One Hundred Years along with a literary biography of Marquez. It was a wonderful experience for me. BTW my taste is purely science fiction.
My favorite Marquez story is that he never used adverbs ending in -mente, so he called his English language translator (Edith Grossman) and requested that she not use any adverbs ending in -ly.
Hahaha. Definitely different in English. Adverbs I can think of in English that don't end in -ly: Fast, slow, quick, well. That's all I've got off the top of my head.
I read six of Garcia Márquez's stories in school - my favorite was "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World"[0] ("El Ahogado más Hermoso del Mundo"). If you're looking to get a taste of his writing but don't have time to read an entire book, this short story captures his style very well.
In a similar vein is "An Old Man with Very Enormous Wings" [1] ("Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes"), which was referenced in R.E.M's music video for "Losing My Religion[2]
I absolutely adore this man. I was lucky to be given a portuguese-translated copy of "one hundred years of solitude" at the age of 16. I read it back then and loved the story itself and specially the beautiful writing style. About four or five years later I read it again in the original (even though I don't speak spanish very well) and was even more amazed about the beauty of it and about how _my_ interpretation of it changed. I loved everything I have ever read from him, but I loved "one hundred years" so much I even feel ashamed of trying to use my own words to describe it.
His best known work is "One Hundred Years of Solitude", which sold 20 million copies.
Or, as the OP describes it:
> The Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since ‘Don Quixote.’ ” The novelist William Kennedy hailed it as “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.”
It's an excellent book, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. That said, I'm kind of surprised (but pleased) to see that his passing was noted by HN readers.
"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" (Crónica de una muerte anunciada) is a beautiful piece of fiction, and hugely influential. When I first read it, suddenly a number of other books and films seemed to spring from this single point of inspiration.
I think he was, in no small part, popular for the same reason that Sean Penn got his second Oscar for Milk: politics.
Marquez thumbed the eye of colonialism. And he wrote a bunch of rolling sentences with colourful imagery. But I don't see why he deserves the Nobel Prize over, to take a glaring example, Borges.
Except that Borges didn't really write anything politically fashionable, as opposed to possessing any other literary virtue.
This is not a comment on Marquez, who probably deserved his Nobel, but: everyone knows that the literature Prize is thoroughly politicized, perhaps as much as that supreme expression of European political sentiment, the Nobel Peace Prize. Just reflect for a moment how it is that the writer of English sometimes described as the most important since Shakespeare never won: Nabokov's unwavering opposition to Communist tyranny and disdain for literature as a vehicle for political propaganda disqualified him.
This is utter nonsense. García Márquez wrote some of the most compelling and beautiful stories of the 20th century. Borges wrote the literary equivalent of late night stoner conversations, covering up a lack of substance with erudition.
I don't deny that the Nobel Prize can be political, but García Márquez was one of the most deserving recipients.
I was considering phrasing my comment as "conversations between stoned philosophy students", so yes, that sounds about right.
Not to mention the fact that a philosophy course about Borges will likely be examining the work of the philosophers Borges was referencing. I've yet to see anyone make the claim that Borges originated any of the important philosophical ideas in his stories.
Edit: Just to back this up a little more, here is a quote from the man himself: "But I wonder if they are my ideas. Because really I am not a thinker. I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don’t think that I’m a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps."
I've yet to see anyone make the claim that Borges originated any of the important philosophical ideas in his stories.
The idea of text as a finite construct struck me as original when I first encountered it in The Library of Babel. Are there any earlier sources that I should be aware of?
As someone who's interested in interactive fiction, I found a lot of prescient thinking in Borges. His work becomes more relevant over time, even as it posits its own eventual redundancy. I'm not sure anyone can say that about García Márquez. But like others are saying, there is no need to take away respect from one of these authors to pay it to the other.
Edit: Just to back this up a little more, here is a quote from the man himself: "But I wonder if they are my ideas. Because really I am not a thinker. I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes, but I don’t think that I’m a thinker. I suppose that my thinking has been done for me by Berkeley, by Hume, by Schopenhauer, by Mauthner perhaps."
“By two o'clock in the morning they had each drunk three brandies, and he knew, in truth, that he was not the man she was looking for, and he was glad to know it. "Bravo, lionlady," he said when he left. "We have killed the tiger.”
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”
“He is ugly and sad... but he is all love.”
“[The captain] looked at Florentino Ariza, his invincible power, his intrepid love and was overwhelmed by the belated suspicion that it is life, more than death, that has no limits.”
Agree that this thread should not gloss over the gigabytes of rubbish written by undergrads in response to "magical realism", and what's worse, the person-years wasted by a devotion to the arts inspired by a combination of a childish attraction to this sort of stuff and the spurious academic credentials accorded to it.
His books were part of my adolescence, but "One Hundred Years of Solitude" was the essence of my formal education, I am sad he died but I am utterly glad he's lived.
RIP. I felt a shock when I discovered this when I woke up. He is probably the author that has influenced me more strongly in my literary tastes. Gabo wasn't just a great writer but loved by many in spanish speaking countries. His mastery of the prose and outstanding ability on his craft are laudable but Gabo was as well a great person. A friend had the chance to meet him in the context of his PhD, I guess I'll forever envy her for that.
Being this my first HN comment (thanks Gabo for the strength) I'll go all out with a second unrelated part of the comment, less emotionally charged but perhaps more HN-like:
There are many comments in the thread about the translation of the first sentence of "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Translating is such a hard task, there is no way part of the meaning/subtleties will not be lost in it since languages are not one to one. And even if we get to pass most of the meaning keeping the flow will be so hard except for very similar languages (spanish/portuguese). What is an impossible problem for computers is one as well for translators, we can only hope they give as a tasty human take on the task. I wonder if one day automatic translations of literary works will have a "style" options to simulate different translator sensibilities or we will settle for a winner-algorithm takes all the translations.
Something more I'd like to share, I'm very curious if other people feel the same because part of my homemade theory of the language depends on this :). I'm lucky enough to read high level literature in different languages, however even if I can appreciate it, the pleasure I experience while reading Spanish is in a different level. Somehow a similar experience happens while talking, I feel more strongly bound to spanish in a very subtle way, it's not something I usually notice, just on some occasions. I only started learning languages after 8. A possible reason is how the brain gets bound to words and language when very young, another is that I have lived more emotional experiences in that language. The second hypothesis would have to explain why I do not feel that way in french even if I've lived in Paris 10 years. Obviously one case study, apply a grain of salt ;)
I'm so 'proud' to see this here, hard to think of something to say so I'll put one of my fav quotes from him:
"She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them."
My first favorite novel in spanish was of GGM, "Relato de un náufrago"(The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor). Many don't know but the full title is actually "Relato de un náufrago que estuvo diez días a la deriva en una balsa sin comer ni beber, que fue proclamado héroe de la patria, besado por las reinas de la belleza y hecho rico por la publicidad, y luego aborrecido por el gobierno y olvidado para siempre."(The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time.)
Here is a great interview with him in The Paris Review [1]. I love when he says,
"It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination."
I know the Caribbean very well and could not agree more.
As a programmer and a poetry/book lover, it is sad news, plrease have a 5min break from whatever code you are writing(on your free time of course) to check this author out!
This is one of the reasons I keep reading Hacker News. It's a great source for cutting-edge tech news; more importantly, it's also a great source for important news.
I agree but as I read this I had a morbid thought - I'm posing it wondering if anyone else relates. I couldn't help but think, now that he's dead I can dig into his works without the fear of being overrun by his output. It is as though death has given me a little bit of an upper hand.
Oh no... GGM was an underappreciated author in non-spanish speaking world (in spite of wonderful, gift translators... he was just an intrinsically difficult author to translate because of the poetic quality of his writing IMHO). Cien Anos de Soledad was one of the first non-trivial, non-english books I read. RIP.
edit: okay, removed 'really'.. I think he was underappreciated on a popular level, even though he was very well appreciated on a critical level.
Can someone tell me what is the theme of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" as applied to modern society? I read the book awhile ago and appreciated greatly the various character sketches.
Unfortunately, the literary criticism that I sought out back then at liberal arts college, focused mostly on the metaphor of the European colonialism on Latin America (industrialization of the town with the rubber-plant, and the subsequent massacre of the residents after some kind of rubber-plant revolution, consequences of military rule and violent overthrows as embodied by Colonel Buendia and circular nature of the history, Spanish colonialism past long felt after Latin America became independent).
Tbh, I'm not really interested in the whole multiculturalism and ethnic studies rehashing the white guilt trope. However, I find the obsession of the various characters fascinating, the scientific obsession of the original patriach that eventually descended into madness, Colonel Buendia making little gold fishes, the incestuous natures of the whole family, some ethereal nympho character that doesn't speak a word and then one day transcend to haven much to the horror of the venerable matriarch. What is your interpretation of the book?
Generally science and industry are negative factors for Macondo. Throughout the book Macondo grows to be a darker place after a brief initial boost from scientific method; however science when paired with capitalism can be dangerous (unhealthy obsessions with alchemy and banana republics come to mind as examples). Capitalism + science = weapons of mass destruction and war. It isn't necessarily white guilt but capitalist and technological guilt.
Of course, as in any Marquez, there's a great deal about how powerful love is, transcending cultural narratives and causing its own problems.
I cannot do a literary critique. But I can tell you that when I was 17, I started reading "One hundred years of solicitude" and couldn't stop until I finished the whole book. I felt enchanted, it is a feeling that I never had either before or after. I read it in Spanish, (my native tongue) so your mileage may vary.
I think sometimes it is OK to be simply enchanted. (Well I think it's always OK, but ...) I tend to favor literary "analysis" that dwells on that feeling of enchantment, tries to explain it to an extent, and sometimes even re-create that feeling. I'm not sure an overarching "meaning" is always really needed.
For several years I followed the mailing lists dedicated to several of my favorite authors, and at the same time took literature classes at university. Both were great, but I'll always consider those mailing lists my "real" education in literature. University was mostly good for learning to write a certain kind of essay, and how to read in ways that are valued by tenured professors (which isn't exactly a bad thing--these are smart, interesting people).
> University was mostly good for learning to write a certain kind of essay, and how to read in ways that are valued by tenured professors.
Not to be pedantic, but what specific value did you find in academic literary critique? My personal experience in University wasn't very positive. I found most books/papers to be derivative or more of a documentation of humanities people's self-referential knowledge (e.g., explaining all of the literary (Grego-Roman, Biblical and Celtic) allusions and historical context in "Ulysses"; and therefore, all of these allusions fit in this grand theory of {Hegelian Dialectic, Post-modernity}).
IMO, it kind of defeats the purpose of literature if one has to be so well versed in the Western cannon or whatever cannon to appreciate a narrative which ultimately conveys a human experience. A humanities grad student once explained to me that in literary analysis, the creativity is "in the interpretation as opposed to the creation for the author." I don't understand why in a subjective experience as literature, why an academic's word is then more valuable than mine or a monkey's. But I'm curious why you have a different perspective as for why professors in humanities have good perspective on literature.
Well, I'm not sure I have as strong of a position on this as I should. The way literature is talked about in university isn't really the way I would ever prefer to talk about literature really, but it was enlightening in the same way that doing anything strenuous outside of your comfort zone can be enlightening. The essays themselves, if you had a demanding prof, could be an excellent chance to practice analytical thinking and learn to compose your thoughts on paper.
In general, I don't think there's a compelling reason why Writing Composition has to be tied so closely to Literature. And really of the two most demanding essay-writing profs I had, only one taught literature. (The other taught symbolic logic and a Frege/Russell/Wittgenstein seminar I took.)
You're right that most the essays are derivative and bad, but I think that's general to all writing--fiction, non-fiction, academic writing, whatever. It's all usually derivative and bad because it's really hard to make something that isn't. And while there is a taste for those name-dropping "look what I've read" essays, I never had a prof that didn't also appreciate a tight, close reading. I always stuck to close reading anyway, as I suspect most people on this forum would. (It feels less bullshitty to look at one or two small things extremely closely, than to fling around loose references to god knows what theories and famous names.)
It's interesting that your friend said that. I'm not sure I understand completely what is meant by that, but here's my personal take on it: I think literary criticism should be subject to the same scrutiny that the original literary texts are. And if a work doesn't partake of creative exuberance* like an excellent novel or poem might, then I can't really be bothered to care about it. I think literature should respond in kind. Some criticism does this, and is breathtaking in the same way reading Whitman, e.g., can be breathtaking. Bloom's little book Anxiety of Influence, for example, is something I found beautiful and strange in a way I had never before encountered.
I don't think academic literary critics really see what they do as an artform necessarily, so my view is probably a very marginal one, and one they might scoff at. I don't even know of a sub-discipline that promotes criticism-as-artform, so maybe I'm just weird. Probably weird.
In the end I try to take a soft stance on this because I want to leave room for the idea that other people may enjoy things that I don't. I would never talk about literature the way they do outside of the pressures of "academic success," but perhaps they find it to be genuinely thrilling. If so, I'm only happy for them, and wish them the best. Many of them had an obvious passion for literature, including one prof who was completely looney-tunes for Shakespeare. :-) And that's nothing but delightful.
* - which isn't to imply there need be an exuberant style.
A deeply thoughtful literary great, to rank among the likes of Dickens, Cervantes and Dostoyevsky in my mind. Love in the Time of Cholera changed me, just like Crime and Punishment did. It affected me more than any other book has. At the time of my life when I read it, I felt that it spoke to my personal sensibilities. I followed that up with Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which I honestly think is his absolute masterpiece.
I read Marquez's master piece '100 Years of Solitude' in my native language Malayalam 25 years ago and it got etched into my mind forever. In the next 2-3 years I read almost all the works of Marquez available in English. Later a lot more Latin American Authors including Borges, Huan Rulfo, Carpentier, Manuel Puig, Fuentes,Cortazar, Paz etc. became popular among the reading public in my region, but GGM was the one who started it all and remains one of my favourite writers of 20th century. Have a feeling that Marquez' did his best in the short story genre - despite his reputation as a novelist.
It is a coincidence that one of the first magical realist novels of my mother tongue - 'Khazakinte Ithihasam (Legends of Khazak)' also got published almost at the same time as '100 years of Solitude' was being published in Spanish and both works present highly resplendent and almost spiritual language and journeys (almost untranslatable).
Opening line of 'Legends of Khazak'- 'When the bus finally reached Kooman Kavu, the place did not seem unfamiliar to Ravi'.
It has always struck me how Magic Realism seems to be so prevalent in the literary tradition of such distant and otherwise unrelated areas as South America and India.
I am no expert in any of the fields that could try to provide an answer to this so I'm unable to provide a data-backed explanation. All the explanations I can think about are quite "magic realists" so better suited for a short story than for hacker news ;)
Mario strayed. He fell in love with a beautiful Swedish air stewardess whom he met while travelling. He left his wife and moved to Stockholm.
Distraught, his wife Patricia went to see her husband's best friend, Gabriel. After discussing the matter with his wife, Mercedes, he advised Patricia to divorce Mario. And then he consoled her. No one else quite knows what form this consolation took... Eventually Mario returned to his wife, who told him of Gabriel's advice to her, and of his consolation.
I actually asked Llosa about it when he spoke at my college about seven years ago. His reply was something along the line of, "I don't talk about that."
While writing 100 Years of Solitude he listened to The Beatles' A Hard Day Night album on repeat. After the book was published he received a letter from a group of Mexican college students who asked him if he was listening to A Hard Day's Night when writing the book, because they felt the album in his words.
Many people in the US, when asked about Colombia, think of negative things; drugs, etc. Also, down in Colombia, the Caribbean coast was often looked down upon by those from the capital -- seen mainly as uneducated people with strange customs and a different way of talking. Gabriel Garcia Marquez uplifted not only the image of Colombia world-wide, but also the image and culture of the Caribbean coast. I am proud that my family is from that region and he made me proud to tell the world that I am Colombian. May he rest in Peace.
Also, I think this quote (from an article in NPR) sums up why he's so admired in Latin America:
"Garcia Marquez is speaking about all the people who are marginal to history, who have not had a voice. He gives a voice to all those who died. He gives a voice to all those who are not born yet. He gives a voice to Latin America."
The spanish department at Princeton was kind enough to let me take a Spanish class while a visiting post-doc. It was great for learning Spanish. But it was so, so painful to see the sorts of pretentious bullshit that the undergraduates were inspired to produce by reading pieces by Marquez, and other South American authors writing in the "magical realist" style. I remember enjoying "Love in the Time of Cholera", and I am sure Marquez himself was great, but in general that sort of crap is exactly what you don't want your children wasting their time studying at university, and potentially misdirecting their professional lives thereafter through an underapprecation of the fact that there is aesthetic beauty in actual real stuff and facts about how the world really works.
OT but tangential any magical realism authors to read? So far, I got Marquez, Jorge Louis Borges and Murakami. And preferably recommendation should be good to provide philosophical consolation to a code monkey worker-bee in the capitalist society.
One of the very best books of the century, by an often underappreciated author. When I first read it I didn't know Bulgakov and was amazed that such an interesting and beautiful novel could exist.
And yes, it is generally associated with magical realism as far as I know, although more loosely.
- Adolfo Bioy Casares, a friend of Borges' and another great argentine writer. See Diary of the War of the Pig
- Italo Calvino, an Italian writer whose writings you may find of interest in a smiliar (although more wondrous) vein
Friend convinced me to read it years ago. I found it very different from what I (and others who read more) say about Russian lit. It was very hard for me to even piece all together.
Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49: -- where ONE (deceased?) Pierce Inveraity(PI) owns most of San Narcisco, where everyone else, the passed-over Preterite, toss their composed loved letters in the waste can to communicate, and their lives become a miracle by Picard's Theorem in the Cauchy integral formula, eg, Exectrix Oedipa and the Paranoids being chased by a pathological Tony `The Jaguar' and his mafia soldier goons, till sufficiently close to the boundary shores of an artificial island in the middle of PI's artificial closed contoured lake, and withess' another miracle. Again.
Try Guy Gavriel Kay. He is generally considered a fantasy writer, but I'd say "alternative-historical magical realism" is a more accurate description. I see a lot of more recent Rushdie in his style. Start with Under Heaven (Tigana is the more common first recommendation, but I don't actually like it as much).
I have enjoyed Louis de Bernières, in particular his Latin American trilogy, which Bernières acknowledges as highly influenced by GGM. I don't know that it's philosophically consoling, though. I guess I might call it Márquez-lite.
His writing was like poetry and song, all in one.
Second best opening after "A Hundred Years of Solitude":
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide."
I once met this american guy who told me in fluent spanish that he went and studied the spanish language after reading one of GGM's books because he wanted to read it in it's original language.
Much of what I read of his was in Spanish, a second language for me, but even so I could see his command of language was incredible.
Things like, in "Relato de un náufrago", the story teller has emotional ups and downs each chapter - and García Márquez carefully chose words that sounded emotionally up or down, giving a sense of rising and falling on waves through the whole story.
That, detected by someone whose Spanish was "solid" at best - what a joy it must be for a native to read.
"In his novels and stories, storms rage for years, flowers drift from the skies, tyrants survive for centuries, priests levitate and corpses fail to decompose. And, more plausibly, lovers rekindle their passion after a half-century apart."
"Less plausibly"! "Less plausibly"!
Geeze. Someone needs to teach these goobs to write.
Coincidentially, a few weeks ago I put Marquez on my to-read list. Bein a native German, my first choice was naturally the German translation. English wouldn't be a problem though, so I wonder which one I should choose. Granted, in the end the books shouldn't suffer a lot from translating.
Liking storytelling alone is sometimes not enough to like Marquez, you have to love language too. He uses (some might say abuses) language to impact his storytelling, often using incredibly long, convoluted sentences to weave his narrative. It can be hard to follow, sometimes intentionally, but I find it enormously satisfying to read and follow along with his brain. Like slowly drinking a maple syrup of words.
One of the best examples is the first 15 or so[1] pages of Autumn of the Patriarch[2], where the narrator winds this thread of what has happened slowly, using sentences that span pages, until you realize a shift from what has happened to a sort of what is about to happen. Then a fist slams on the table and the realization strikes you that the first part of the description was a kind of set up, this beautiful ruse. I wish I could be more descriptive but it would give away the delight. It's a great book about terror and despotism.
Marquez is not the kind of thing you can read in a noisy environment. At least I can't. I adore him so much. I could write a eulogy for days.
If you've never read him, please take a moment to read one of my favorite short stories, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
http://simonsarris.com/lit/a-very-old-man-with-enormous-wing...
(I've hosted a copy of it (and many more short stories) for ages because most of the copies on the web are plagued with ads and miserable formatting)
If One Hundred Years of Solitude seems too long for you, I urge you to look into some of his very excellent shorter books, such as Autumn but also Of Love and Other Demons[3] and Love in the Time of Cholera.[4]
(Chronicle of a Death Foretold is even shorter, but I do not recommend it as the first Marquez book you read!)
[1] It could be the first 10 or 30 pages, it's been several years, but I am certain it's one of the better (and shorter) examples of his style.
[2] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0060882867
[3] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1400034922
[4] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0307389731