When You Don't Like The Book - One Hundred Years of Solitude

Some books you have to be in the mood for. Some books deserve to be read on paper, rather than by audiobook. Some books have been sitting in your bookshelf for years and you've never got around to reading them. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is one such book. 

I know exactly where it is on my bookshelf (sitting next to Love in a Time of Cholera) behind my hairbrushes, near the Rushdies and Atwoods. I've had it for well over 20 eyars. Who knows where I picked it up, but it is there. Unlike the Rushdies and Atwoods, I've looked at these books and never got further than page 30. 

This time I tried listening to One Hundred Years of Solitude. 

I know it's a good book. I know it's a great book. I get that people have this as their favourite book - but I'm not going to be one of them. 

There's a few things I know. For one, I'm not really big into magic realism. It's okay - and a little bit of light literary magic realism is fine. I love the way Salman Rushdie does it. Laura Esquivel is another who uses this literary trope well. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is next level. A lot of South American authors use it - and along with the foreign-ness of it all, it makes it hard to navigate the next. 

The more I got into it the book, the more I got it. Keeping track of all the characters, most of whom had similar names, but with differing circumstances was hard. 

In the end, I got the point that keeping a village away from everything for a hundred years, letting little in or out is going to be bad for the town. 

I also get that the book is covering up a heap of political unrest, junta action and all sorts of things somebody living in Australia will never gel with. 

I read one comment that said, "Come to Colombia, you will then understand."

Interesting thought. 

For me, I reckon in a year or so, I should pull out the paper copy and wade through it again, on paper, using different synapses - maybe then I'll understand what I read a little more. 

(and before you ask, the writing, even in translation, is delicious - it's also very opaque.)

Maybe I'll get back to James Joyce's Ulysses....

Maybe I'm a glutton for punishment. 

Today's song: