“Jose Arcadio Buendia was not as crazy as the family said, but that he was the only one who had enough lucidity to sense the truth that time also stumbled and had accidents and could therefore splinter and leave an eternalized fragment in a room"(Marquez 375).
Certainly the magical realism of Marquez may be scoffed by the scientific minds of 130 Linden, but on a psychological plain this quote beautifully portrays our nostalgia. In the text the quotation explains how a room does not decay, it remains the same temperature and atmosphere for a hundred years. Matt and AJ would laugh at such fantasy, but when applied to our mind’s tendency to dwell on a certain event, a certain afternoon, or certain game of chess these two logical minds must concede to the axiomatic power of the quotation.
Hey AJ, remember when I beat you in chess three times in a row! You suck. We are always in the dark kitchen of Dan’s old apartment on Buff. ave.
Dan, remember that giant canvass we painted in Jaden; it’s still on my wall. I love booze and paint.
Next line of thought:
So I finished Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude last night. Have any of you read this brilliant dragging epic? I recommend you read it. I know you all would enjoy parts of the novel, if for nothing but an enchanting escape to an old world Columbia. The book beautifully flows through time slightly like Faulkner but in a much less cryptic and cynical fashion. Marquez dashes in small amounts of fantasy (a trail of blood flowing a very specific path through a house to someone’s door) as if he were simply describing the flow of a creek. He handles everything with a very dead pan voice. The characters pass the same name to their kids again and again and the cycles of repetition all mesh together like a slow roasted stew. Is this Buendia the great grandfather or the uncle or the grandson?
With fresh beautiful descriptions of sex, war, and fucking god damn pride the book enchants.
If any of you pick up the book, I warn you that it drags a bit, but is certainly worth the effort. I found it best to just keep reading and try to feel each experience and not worry which character is which.
First line:
“Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Colonel Aureliano is the motherfucker with the pride to inspire any space monkey to fucking go into space even if almost all space monkeys die during, if not immediately after the flight. Damn Matt, I went to the “monkeys in space” web site and was physched when I saw how many of my kindred were martyrs.
2 comments:
Please bring that book with you when you visit in August, unless it’s a hardback. I loathe hardback volumes of the classics. Not even A Hundred Years of Solitude deserves more than two inches of space on a bookshelf. On a related note, I’m reading Marquez’s most recent book, Memoria de mis putas tristes, , which roughly translates as In memory of my sad whores. It begins with the following delectable line:
“El año de mis noventa años quise regalarme una noche de amor loco con una adolescente virgen.”
which roughly translates as:
“The year of my ninetieth birthday I wanted to give myself the gift of one night of crazy love with a virgin adolescent.”
I doubt that I’ll ever live to be ninety, but if I do . . .
I also recently read A hundred years, and found it to be very good. I love magical realism and the parts about flying carpets, the man always followed by birds, and all the rest were wonderful.
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