After finishing Netherland, I decided it was time for another one of those classic novels I still have to read (on a sidenote: I think that in 50 years time Netherland itself will be considered one of those 'must read' classic novels, but that may be my prejudice as a New York-loving Dutch person). Since Gabriel García Márquez has just passed away, and One Hundred Years of Solitude has been living in my bookcase for a couple of years now, ever since my boyfriend got the novel for his birthday from a Mexican exchange student, I decided to go for that one. My boyfriend isn't going to read it even if he somehow finds himself in 100 years of solitude, and a lot of good things have been said about it.
This wasn't my first Márquez novel, because for Spanish class in secondary school I'd read No One Writes to the Colonel. In Spanish. This was, to put it mildly, a challenge. Week after week we'd wrestle through the paragraphs, each having to read and then explain a page in turn. You got to prepare at home, so I always had lots of translated words scribbled in the margins, but still I couldn't make any sense of it. And I wasn't the only one, after finally making it to the final word in the novel, mierda, our teacher triumphantly slammed his copy of the book shut, threw it on his desk, and said; "Si! Mierda!" We stared back at him, expecting some kind of explanation. When he just stood there waiting for an equally enthusiastic response from our side, one of the students ventured: "Mierda? Shit? What does that even mean?" He took a big dramatic Spanish sigh and said: "If you don't understand why that is a great ending, you don't understand literature." Which I thought a bit rich, even then.
Anyway, I would not let that experience put me off of reading
One Hundred Years of Solitude, only this time, I would be reading in English. The front, consisting of a naked lady staring vacantly in the viewers eyes, somewhat baffled me, especially in connection with the blurb, which informed me that the novel was about a little village, and especially about seven generations of a family who had lived in that little village for one hundred years already.
I'm now more than a quarter of the way through, and I don't know much more about the naked lady, or about the seven generations. What I do know is that this book is brilliant.
I love magical realism, which is why I love Neil Gaiman's work, but this is a whole different thing altogether. You just have to let your suspension of disbelief stretch into impossible lengths, and just go with whatever is happening, even though all your instincts are telling you that a minute ago everything was just as it is in the real world. Also, the style is great, with some characters drawn out over the pages, while others are put down in a few brushstrokes, but then they all turn out to be completely different then you'd originally thought. Big, important events (death, war) can be condensed into a single line, which you will then miss and have to reread to get, whereas small, uneventful things can be drawn out across the pages, with some paragraphs stretching multiple pages.
It took me a while to get into, to get the dense, layered writing style, the somewhat-recognisable-but-still-strangely-different setting and the many references and figurative elements, but now that I'm into it, I want it to last as long as possible. This isn't a novel to read quickly or glancingly, but also, I don't want it to end.
So once again, the label 'classic' has proven to be correct. I feel like I am repeating myself with every classic novel I read, but again, this will be one of those novels that will stay with me for years to come.
One Hundred Years of Solitude, only this time, I would be reading in English. The front, consisting of a naked lady staring vacantly in the viewers eyes, somewhat baffled me, especially in connection with the blurb, which informed me that the novel was about a little village, and especially about seven generations of a family who had lived in that little village for one hundred years already.
I'm now more than a quarter of the way through, and I don't know much more about the naked lady, or about the seven generations. What I do know is that this book is brilliant.
I love magical realism, which is why I love Neil Gaiman's work, but this is a whole different thing altogether. You just have to let your suspension of disbelief stretch into impossible lengths, and just go with whatever is happening, even though all your instincts are telling you that a minute ago everything was just as it is in the real world. Also, the style is great, with some characters drawn out over the pages, while others are put down in a few brushstrokes, but then they all turn out to be completely different then you'd originally thought. Big, important events (death, war) can be condensed into a single line, which you will then miss and have to reread to get, whereas small, uneventful things can be drawn out across the pages, with some paragraphs stretching multiple pages.
It took me a while to get into, to get the dense, layered writing style, the somewhat-recognisable-but-still-strangely-different setting and the many references and figurative elements, but now that I'm into it, I want it to last as long as possible. This isn't a novel to read quickly or glancingly, but also, I don't want it to end.
So once again, the label 'classic' has proven to be correct. I feel like I am repeating myself with every classic novel I read, but again, this will be one of those novels that will stay with me for years to come.
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