***
Goodbye to Gabriel García Marquez.
April 17, 2014
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Col. Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
"At that time Macondo was a village of 20 adobe houses built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”
Goodbye to Gabriel García Marquez.
Goodbye to Gabriel García Marquez.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
22 comments:
I love that book.
Sometimes, through no fault of their own, the silly Swedes get it right.
Damn fine writer. Pity about the politics, though.
Great writer.
No college degree.
Great first sentence. I loved the book.
"It was love at first sight" is still my favorite opening line.
Adios. Que vaya con Dios.
Treating this like a café thread, I just want to say that I prefer your expression in the latest photo, but prefer pictures where your hair is longer.
FWIW.
Meade's vote is 100% of the votes of all the rest of us, plus one.
Vaya con Dios, Senior.
Never heard of him. I have heard of Tolstoy and Dickens.
Mike, he's just a good Latin American writer. He writes about the old days in Venezuela and Colombia and thereabouts. It's nice to get away from European and US lit once in awhile. If you read fiction that is.
No doubt, he was a big Castro pal.
Surrealism is a Spanish trait. The histories of Spanish speaking peoples are full of strange, weird events that are credible only because they happened. His prose had the bright effusion of jungle foliage. Everything seemed unreal, but that's the way things happened in his beck of the woods.
I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Took me a while, but it was worth it. Really a magical read.
What a great writer! His politics will eventually be forgotten, but his work will live on like Tolstoy's and Dickens's and Twain's.
Was unlike anything I've read before or since. Not really my type of novel, but it was so unusual, I just had to finish it. Times have changes so much. In the '70s there was quite a collection of quality global writers such as Marquez and V. S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River & Among the Believers) that were known, accessible and important. Despite the Web ( or maybe because of it) you just don't see their likes anymore. Alas.
I recall someone (Mad Magazine) doing a hilarious send up called One Hundred Years of Solid Food. You've really made the mark if Mad Magazine has got you pegged. RIP GGM.
Was unlike anything I've read before or since. Not really my type of novel, but it was so unusual, I just had to finish it. Times have changes so much. In the '70s there was quite a collection of quality global writers such as Marquez and V. S. Naipaul (A Bend in the River & Among the Believers) that were known, accessible and important. Despite the Web ( or maybe because of it) you just don't see their likes anymore. Alas.
I recall someone (Mad Magazine) doing a hilarious send up called One Hundred Years of Solid Food. You've really made the mark if Mad Magazine has got you pegged. RIP GGM.
One of the best experiences I ever had at the opera was seeing the world premiere run of an opera, Florencia en el Amazonas inspired by his book Love in the Time of Cholera. Although a modern opera, it's still lyrical, with beautiful arias and choral sections. Sung in Spanish, it's suffused with the magical realism of his works. The film Like Water for Chocolate was a minor hit in the US and is a good example of the genre.
Few things are as reliable as a dolt's commenting "Never heard of him/her" when Althouse blogs about someone of cultural significance. Why bother? "I just want to speak up solely to attest to my ignorance...."
Re: One hundred years
I don't like surrealism, so the book was a hard slog for me. No doubt its better in Spanish.
The Author's pro-communist politics no doubt helped him get both critical praise and a Nobel prize.
I've read his and Llosa's masterworks (100 Years of Solitude and Conversation in the Cathedral, respectively). Perhaps it was just the translation, though it was the famous one, but I don't get it. He was a moderately good writer, but had nowhere near the imagination of Borges. And poorly imitated the breadth and depth of Llosa's Conversation (well didn't imitate as 100 years came first, but still). Those two books really aren't comparable just in how much better a writer and more acute an observer of human nature Llosa is. And almost no one I know has even heard of Llosa. Sigh.
My favorite author despite the politics which, by the way, never enter the stories.
If you're interested in learning more about him, I recommend reading his partial autobiography, "Living to Tell the Tale".
It was like peeking into another mind, a completely different way of perceiving, and therefore getting a vacation from my/our own. Very relaxing in that sense.
Post a Comment