after a month of tedious reading, i have finally finished a great novel that epitomizes the capability good literature contains:
that of change.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is many things. A dense, complicated, insightful, humorous, philosophical and meticulous novel of ambitious proportions that certainly justifies the fact that Gabo had to sell his furniture just to pay for smokes to finish it. Unfortunately, i had to read it in English. I started to read it in Spanish a few months ago, then i decided to give it away as a gift to a good friend that had just graduated. So, i went ahead and read the copy i had.

Regardless, after talking with a friend in Cambridge who didnt finish it (as i have done with many a work, admittedly...im working on that pile), i would certainly recommend folks take the time to tackle this work. Its understandable. War and Peace, The Karamazov Brothers and Don Quixote are seminal works that i have promised myself i'd get to before i die. Yet, who knows if time will allow me to reach their completion.

at any rate, as Troy McLure once wisefully uttered: "and now what you've all been waiting for...hardcore nudity!"

and does this book have it: not so much a pornographic detail, but a sensous and intense presence of sexuality, which is integral to the reproduction and demise of an entire town.

i just love works that are thick with meaning, albeit magical. For those not in the know, there is a school of Latin-American writers that have rejected the tenets of Magical Realism (and with good reason) in favor of a more realistic approach to contemporary literature. Their called McOndo as in Condos, McDonalds and Macintoshes, which better reflect a globalized Latin-America. I actually like some of their works, despite their own reactionary admissions and a sometimes-weak trashy aesthetic that would work better as London grime (holla Dizzee!) or gritty Mobb Deep-ish poetics-meet-academic identity politics.

but, when all that is said and done, their movement is still based on this one novel. and quite sincerely its one of the few novels i have ever read that moved me, both intellectually and emotionally, in quite some time. which actually surprises me due to its lack (again, this could be a matter of translation) of poetically stringed prose and almost journalistic (which being that Gabo was a journalist...) steez.


my two cents.
this is shit for thinking and feeling people.

now on to Voltaire's Candide, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Gogol's Dead Souls, Homer's The Odyssey and Philip K. Dick's Valis, Carlos Fuentes' La Muerte De Artemio Cruz, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man...

in due time.


Everything is known.