One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel García Márquez [translation from es—Gregory Rabassa]
I’ve had this particular tome on my shelf for years and somehow never quite got round to reading it. It’s odd because I knew it was going to be good. In my head García Márquez has always been linked to Salman Rushdie and I’ve devoured [and for the most part loved] what he’s written, coupled with my love of things Spanish/Latin, it’s inexplicable to me that I haven’t got round to it before.
What did I think? I absolutely loved it. If the cliché about translation is true this must be one of the all-time greats in Spanish [I’ll let you know in about four years when mine is good enough].
As with Rushdie, García Márquez writes the unbelievable as the most natural thing in the world. The transition from descriptions of normal, everyday behaviour in the blinding sun to fantastic, bizarre scenes is seamless. I found my self rereading passages to try to work out where things starting going odd, but never quite managed it.
The pace and breadth of the thing is one of its delights. From the monstrously long broad-ranging paragraphs to the bending and stretching of time through the narrative, the experience is a distortion of the real.
Definitely one to reread, I’m sure it’s one of those that reveals more of itself on subsequent readings. I’m going to start hunting round for second-hand copies of his other books.
posted by pault at 00:57, 06 August 2003 | books