Categories: uncategorized
Date: 24 May 2005 22:51:46
I'm currently reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Interesting book, but I'm struggling to make myself get through it. In fact, I'm about halfway through now and I think I might be about to discard it (gasp!). It's funny about stopping books - once I get to a certain point (about one fifth of the way in, I think) I usually have enough invested in the story and the characters that it's hard to not finish reading the whole thing, even if I'm not really enjoying it.
Fortunately, this book doesn't build up the reader's relationship with the characters at all, so it won't be hard to put down. There is no main character continuing through the book. They pop in and out, about one per three pages it seems, and they all share the same two or three names. This is such-and-such, he did this. He loved someone, he died for his love. This is someone with a similar name, he got shot. This is someone with the same name as the first, he's having sex for the first time. Here is some girl born out of wedlock, she's adopted and ends up marrying someone with the same name as her father. This person starts a war, then ends it. His kids all have his name, and they all do different things, some warlike, some not. Frustrating.
Not that there aren't moments of beautiful prose expressing ingenious ideas. There are. Some of the writing and the intricate little ideas are fantastic and compelling in themselves - but they're not enough to hold the book together, in my humble opinion.
So we'll wait. I'm going to start another book, and if I find myself going back to Marquez I'll know there's some power there that I don't currently see. But I think not.