• Welcome to BookAndReader!

    We LOVE books and hope you'll join us in sharing your favorites and experiences along with your love of reading with our community. Registering for our site is free and easy, just CLICK HERE!

    Already a member and forgot your password? Click here.

Gabriel García Márquez

as one of the few latins here, i shall tell you that if you like garcia marquez, you should check also for mario vargas llosa novels, ah and you might also find carlos fuentes interesting.
 
Thanks for the suggestions! Will check them out :)

And Shade, Marquez is not an easy read but I think very worth your attention :)
 
I found 100 years to be a slow read but worthwhile. Don't be afraid to take your time with it, and frequently consult with the family tree at the beginning.
 
I have nothing to say about Marquez - I just want to applaude Shade for one of the best posts I have ever read!

You're a worthy addition to this place - keep up the good work!

Cheers
 
WOW, great! Thanks for the news Martin! Who thinks they will change the title "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" when it reaches America? Actually, I would translate it as "memories of my sad whores" but then what do I know? :) Not a lot actually. Maybe Mr Micheal can give me his view!

WOW, I am very excited! :) Marquez writing is just so beautiful. The pages breath with life and beauty that make me sigh as I travel the pages with my mind and with my heart. They make me sigh in both!

HORAY! A new novel! Actually, I have lots of his older books to buy yet! SIGH, so many books and life so short :eek:
 
Hi shade :)

Reading this thread again, I think that I did not do justice to your wonderful post here. I will try to correct that now. I cannot match your eloguence, but I will give it a go at giving you a better answer!

By the way, did you ever finish? :)

Shade said:
OK Wabbit, help me out here...

At the minute I am toiling - toiling - my way through Gabriel García Márquez's legendary masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. One thing I can say about Márquez's books is that I never fail to start them, and somehow over the years I have accumulated a number of his novels as well as this one, all of which incidentally show the man's idiosyncratic and perfectly-pitched ear for a title: Love in the Time of Cholera; Of Love and Other Demons; Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Yet I can't say for sure that I have finished any of them (though I am sure I have begun them all), and none has left any trace on my memory, other than his equally fine ear for opening lines:
Click to expand...

Yes, he does! Also, I would say that not just his titles. There are so many beautiful lines within his work. I read a few pages, stop, and see a line that shines with such beauty. I read it, and then read it again.

Wow. So why has my reading of the book followed an exponential decay in pages per day - first 75, then 50, then 36, then 24... so that now, on page 264 of 420, I am so seriously considering letting the bloody thing drop that I am reduced to making this post to persuade others to persuade me of its worth?

It is something to do with my brain, I think, and a couple of wires there that have failed to connect. Because while I am not incapable of reading books which require attention and perseverance, I don't seem quite to have the reservoirs of these qualities to cope with a South American magical realist epic. The problem is just the accumulation of detail and density of incident that made the first few pages so delightful. At no point may your attention drift for - literally - two lines, otherwise you will end up on the next page seeing a reference to an event, or character, whose first mention you missed completely. Márquez is constantly prodding you like this: Aren't you listening? Do keep up. And with his love of page-long paragraphs, sparsity of dialogue and no white line breaks, each 20-page section can seem like a novel in itself.
Click to expand...

Yes, I think you are right about his prodding. I think he does that intentionally! I also think that it's part of the novel and what he is trying to get across. I will come to that in a moment.

And also! He deliberately - charitably one might say wittily - frustrates the reader's attempts to keep on top of what is happening by naming characters similarly: so we have José Arcadio, Aureliano, another José Arcadio, Aureliano José, Arcadio, Aureliano Segundo, José Arcadio Segundo, José Arcadio again, two more Aurelianos, and seventeen brothers of a particular generation all of whom are called Aureliano. And that's just the men. These fall into six generations of the family, a tree for which is provided at the start of the book, but the density of the prose and speed of events, plus the fact that people sometimes continue to appear in the book after they have died, makes it difficult to keep track of the timelines.

All of which leads me to the despairing and frustrating position of getting an occasional half-page glimpse of something great before it all becomes lost again in the melée of brothers and nephews and great-great-grandsons. One erudite and enviable reviewer on Amazon says:



Now to me, even as I let out a low whistle of admiration, this bears as much connection to my reading of the novel as the "it's like Lord of the Flies" review of Jesse Jameson and the Curse of Caldazar did to that book. But there, ahum, all comparisons between Sean Wright and Gabriel García Márquez must stop. Still, can anyone else give me a key to unlock the brilliance that I just know - somewhere, if I can find it - the book possesses?
Click to expand...

Is the book worth reading? Yes, well, you know that I am a big fan of his and so would say that! OK, so I need a reason, right?

Here it is: Yes, it's a very hard book to read for the reasons that you have mentioned. I must confess that I almost gave up at one point myself! But it's a very rich and rewarding novel. It has so much beauty and so much life. I think the density, the many similar names are there to give you a sense of the rush of time. There are many things that he is trying to tell us, I think. There are also many reasons for why you should read it to the end and not give up. I want to give you just one.

This book is life. It is one hundred years. Read it because when you finish, when you close the last page THAT is when it will hit you. At least for me. Only when I turned the very last page did it hit me and affect me in a way that no novel has. You finish it and then, wow... 100 years of life has just passed my fingers that turned those pages. 100 years of life has gone by. When you turn the last page, that is when the rush, the density, all those names, all the life, all the tears, all the death, all the beauty that have been so TIGHTLY packed into those dense pages will rush at you. That is when you might consider it a great novel :)
 
Alas, I didn't finish it - but will no doubt return in due course.

I was interested to hear about Memories of My Melancholy Whores being pirated in Colombia, to the extent that the sellers were offering copies at people's car windows. Raises two questions:

1. Can you imagine people in the English speaking world getting so excited about a piece of literary fiction?

2. How the hell do you pirate a novel? Photocopy it and staple all the pages together...?
 
Shade said:
Alas, I didn't finish it - but will no doubt return in due course.

I was interested to hear about Memories of My Melancholy Whores being pirated in Colombia, to the extent that the sellers were offering copies at people's car windows. Raises two questions:

1. Can you imagine people in the English speaking world getting so excited about a piece of literary fiction?
Click to expand...

No, sadly not! :(

2. How the hell do you pirate a novel? Photocopy it and staple all the pages together...?[/QUOTE]

Make it walk the plank? :D

Anyway, hope you get back to 100 years! Even, at the end, if you do not like it then at least you gave it a shot! You can do it! Go go go!!!
 
SillyWabbit said:
No, sadly not! :(

2. How the hell do you pirate a novel? Photocopy it and staple all the pages together...?
Click to expand...

Make it walk the plank? :D

Anyway, hope you get back to 100 years! Even, at the end, if you do not like it then at least you gave it a shot! You can do it! Go go go!!![/QUOTE]


You probably, then, have not seen the book tables that line the streets of NYC. Pirated bestsellers left and right, all properly bound.

I imagine they have several professional-grade typesetters input the text, send it to an overseas printer and repackage it. The way they do cds and dvds. If they can pirate a Rolex, they can sure copy a book. Easy.
 
So 100 Years of Solitude is good? It's on my list. Wabbit, I feel like you do all the time (I'm to lazy to quote, but about finishing the book and feeling the energy of one hundred years that has just passed through your hands). It's amazing...sort of like coming back from another plane of conciousness, it's almost painful, but so sweet.

I got hooked on Hispanic authors over this past summer (mostly Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda, and Marquez). I read (and loved) Of Love and Other Demons, and later Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I had to put Love in the Time of Cholera down for a while, but am beginning it again now. Last time I hit a slump around page forty...it's almost as though I feel I'm unworthy of reading it, like there are infinite deeper meanings that I can't fathom and so am doing the book an injustice by reading it. But I love it all the same.
 
I think the beauty of Marquez is that you can read his books without grasping every single intricacy and STILL thoroughly enjoy them...'Love In The Time Of Cholera' being a prime example of this...
 
evie said:
So 100 Years of Solitude is good? It's on my list. Wabbit, I feel like you do all the time (I'm to lazy to quote, but about finishing the book and feeling the energy of one hundred years that has just passed through your hands). It's amazing...sort of like coming back from another plane of conciousness, it's almost painful, but so sweet.

I got hooked on Hispanic authors over this past summer (mostly Isabel Allende, Pablo Neruda, and Marquez). I read (and loved) Of Love and Other Demons, and later Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I had to put Love in the Time of Cholera down for a while, but am beginning it again now. Last time I hit a slump around page forty...it's almost as though I feel I'm unworthy of reading it, like there are infinite deeper meanings that I can't fathom and so am doing the book an injustice by reading it. But I love it all the same.
Click to expand...

Ah! You mirror my feellings on those things :)

Yeah, I too am hooked on Hispanic authors! I really love magic realism and those stories just seem to be filled with the sunlight they are written under. They always have such energy, verve, beauty and invention to them.

Yes, love the authors you have mentioned. I discovered the poetry of Neruda recently. He is a really wonderful poet! Have you tired laura esquivel? I can recommend her book For water like chocolate At the moment, I have another book by her on my shelf called Swift as desire

I have read Love in the Time of Cholera and felt exactly the same way as you about this book. Its very difficult to read and you have to read SO CAREFULLY or you miss something. Like you, I felt a bit unworthy of reading that book because there seemed so many currents of meaning under that river of words. I was always trying to think deeply about what he was trying to tell me in the book. Anyway, difficult to read but very worth it. It's a beautiful book from him, as usual.

Have you noticed it mentioned in another thread that Marquez has a new book comming out? It's out in Spanish but yet to be translated. :)
 
I noticed. I'm excited! Though there's so much to read, i'll never get it all done. I'll have to check out the other author you mentioned.
 
I heard...

I heard that too, about the pirated copies and I also heard another strange thing, correct me if I'm wrong: that Marquez is likely to change the ending of his latest book in order to trick book pirates and those who sell the copies.
Isn't this strange? I mean, is the destiny of a book influenced by the way it is sold and printed etc? Well, If I go back in time a little I remember the 19th century novels that were published in monthly instalments and that are classics today. Not many people know that writers like Dickens or Hardy changed novel endings and chapter endings to please their publishers. :rolleyes:
 
havent read that

I havent read that particular book of marquez but i really did enjoy One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love In the Time of Cholera. Ive read these books in both English and Filipino. I guess i should learn Spanish so i won't be a victim of a translator's mediocrity.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top