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🦋 High Points
100 Years of Solitude is a pretty engaging book overall. What is really making the reading experience work for me though, what I'm thinking of as the high points, is the 2-to-5-page narrative sections told in long, quickly flowing paragraphs, anecdotes from Macondo's history. The journey leading up to the founding of the village was one such portion, another is the epidemic of insomniac amnesia which ends when MelquÃades returns to the village. It would be worth while to compile a list of these passages, they seem like the heart of the story to me but I'm not really sure what proportion of the book they make up. It is impossible to stop reading in the middle of one of these passages. Very difficult to quote from them, too -- I want to pick something from the insomnia passage which will communicate its feeling, but I can't quote one sentence without everything around it -- the passage is atomic in a way. Its impact lies in the flow of narrative from image to image rather than in any particular image. Well maybe this: Úrsula has been running a business selling candies shaped like little animals; these animals are how the plague of insomnia is eventually transmitted from the BuendÃa family to the rest of the village -- Children and adults sucked happily on the delicious little green roosters of insomnia, the exquisite rosy fish of insomnia, the tender little golden horses of insomnia, and when the sun rose on Monday, the whole village was still awake.
And, and look at this: Aureliano and his father have been fighting the amnesia by labeling everything in the village with its name and function -- "This is a cow. One must milk it every morning, and must warm the milk and mix it with coffee to make café con leche." A sign in the middle of town states "God exists." After months of this, when MelquÃades (as yet unidentified -- no one remembers who he is) returns, José Arcadio BuendÃa found him seated in the hall, fanning himself with a worn black hat, compassionate and attentive, reading the notes taped to the walls.
posted evening of Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
➳ More posts about Cien años de soledad
➳ More posts about Gabriel García Márquez
➳ More posts about Readings
I remember really enjoying reading 100YoS when I read it with Scattergood students in (I think) 1971.
posted evening of March 30th, 2011 by George
Cool, I think it would have just been published in translation then.
posted morning of March 31st, 2011 by Jeremy
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