Collect One Hundred Years Of Solitude Generated By Gregory Rabassa Issued As Textbook

I know that I'm supposed to like this book because it is a classic and by the same author who wrote Love in the Time of Cholera.
Unfortunately, I just think it is unbelievably boring with a jagged plot that seems interminable, Sure, the language is interesting and the first line is the stuff of University English courses, Sometimes I think books get tagged with the "classic" label because some academics read them and didn't understand and so they hailed these books as genius.
These same academics then make a sport of looking down their noses at readers who don't like these books for the very same reasons.
If this all sounds too specific, yes I had this conversation with a professor of mine,

I know that other people love this book and more power to them, I've tried to read it all the way through three different times and never made it pastpages before I get so bored keeping up with all the births, deaths, magical events and mythical legends.
I'll put it this way, I don't like this book for the same reason that I never took up smoking.
If I have to force myself to like it, what's the point, When I start coughing and hacking on the first cigarette, that is my body telling me this isn't good for me and I should quit right there.
When I start nodding off on the second page of One Hundred Years of Solitude that is my mind trying to tell me I should find a better way to pass my time.

"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to

remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.
"

And so begins our journey into Macondo, as García Márquez's words walk us through seven generations of the Buendia family, where time has come to a standstill, and the fate of every character seems to be written with an ink of tragedy.


Gabriel García Márquez is a truly gifted storyteller, and his ability to find metaphors, to make fables out of the most mundane events in life with the charm of Scheherazade allows him a rare distinction of being one of the pioneers of magical realism.


Themes and Symbolism

The book has a plot sewn together with metaphors and rhetoric representing the story of Latin America as a whole.


Insomnia plague

Rebeca brings a mysterious insomnia plague to Macondo, causing loss of memory and sleep.
The people of Macondo entertained themselves by telling each other the same nonsensical stories in repetition and everything in households having to be labeled, representing a metaphor for the story of Latin America being a repetition of its past and its cure at the hands of the sage represented its return to history, moving out of isolation.


Incest

The Buendias are shown to have a tendency towards incest, while their family always suffers from the fear of punishment in the form of the birth of a monstrous child with a pig's tail.


Gender roles

Throughout the novel, the men instigate chaos while the women strive to maintain order, sometimes in vain.
García Márquez calls this a representation of the Latin American machismo,

The Glass City

The glass city is an image that comes to José Arcadio Buendía in a dream.
It is the reason for the location of the founding of Macondo, but it is also a symbol of the fate of Macondo.


Colors

Yellow and gold are two significant colors in Macondo's history.
In Macondo, gold represents solitude and bad luck, When José Arcadio Buendía discovers the formula for turning metals into gold and shows his son the result of his experiment, he says it looks like dog shit.


"Yellow is lucky but gold isnt, nor the color gold, I identify gold with shit, Ive been rejecting shit since I was a child, so a psychoanalyst told me, "

Gabriel García Márquez in The Fragrance of the Guava by Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza

The Banana Massacre

The sitelinkBanana massacre was a massacre of workers for the United Fruit Company that occurred between Decemberand,in the town of Ciénaga near Santa Marta, Colombia.
The strike began on November,, when the workers ceased to perform labor if the company did not reach an agreement with them to grant them dignified working conditions.
A fictional version of the massacre is depicted in the novel,

The Flood

The story has a biblical period of rain and flood, quite similar to the tale of Noah.


Borges

Some of the themes in the novel are obviously inspired by the works of Jorge Luis Borges.
The Garden of Forking Paths, The Library of Babel and many more Borges stories have similar themes of inevitable and inescapable repetition in fictitious realms.
RevisedMarch

Huh Oh, Oh, man. Wow.

I just had the weirdest dream,

There was this little town, right And everybody had, like, the same two names, And there was this guy who lived under a tree and a lady who ate dirt and some other guy who just made little gold fishes all the time.
And sometimes it rained and sometimes it didnt, and and there were fire ants everywhere, and some girl got carried off into the sky by her laundry

Wow.
That was messed up.

I need some coffee,

The was roughly how I felt after reading this book, This is really the only time Ive ever read a book and thought, “You know, this book would be awesome if I were stoned.
” And I dont even know if being stoned works on books that way,

Gabriel Garcia Marquez which is such a fun name to say is one of those Writers You Should Read.
You know the type theyre the ones that everyone claims to have read, but no one really has.
The ones you put in your online dating profile so that people will think youre smarter than you really are.
You get some kind of intellectual bonus points or something, the kind of highbrow cachet that you just dont get from reading someone like Stephen King or Clive Barker.


Marquez was one of the first writers to use “magical realism,” a style of fantasy wherein the fantastic and the unbelievable are treated as everyday occurrences.
While Im sure it contributed to the modern genre of urban fantasy which also mixes the fantastic with the real magical realism doesnt really go out of its way to point out the weirdness and the bizarrity.
These things just happen. A girl floats off into the sky, a man lives far longer than he should, and these things are mentioned in passing as though they were perfectly normal.


In this case, Colonel Aureliano Buendia has seventeen illegitimate sons, all named Aureliano, by seventeen different women, and they all come to his house on the same day.
Remedios the Beauty is a girl so beautiful that men just waste away in front of her, but she doesnt even notice.
The twins Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo may have, in fact, switched identities when they were children, but no one knows for sure not even them.
In the small town of Macondo, weird things happen all the time, and nobody really notices.
Or if they do notice that, for example, the towns patriarch has been living for the last twenty years tied to a chestnut tree, nobody thinks anything is at all unusual about it.


This, of course, is a great example of Dream Logic the weird seems normal to a dreamer, and you have no reason to question anything thats happening around you.
Or if you do notice that something is wrong, but no one else seems to be worried about it, then you try to pretend like coming to work dressed only in a pair of spangly stripper briefs and a cowboy hat is perfectly normal.


Another element of dreaminess that pervades this book is that theres really no story here, at least not in the way that we have come to expect.
Reading this book is kind of like a really weird game of The Sims its about a family that keeps getting bigger and bigger, and something happens to everybody.
So, the narrator moves around from one character to another, giving them their moment for a little while, and then it moves on to someone else, very smoothly and without much fanfare.
Theres very little dialogue, so the story can shift very easily, and it often does,

Each character has their story to tell, but youre not allowed to linger for very long on any one of them before Garcia shows you whats happening to someone else.
The result is one long, continuous narrative about this large and ultimately doomed family, wherein the Buendia family itself is the main character, and the actual family members are secondary to that.


It was certainly an interesting reading experience, but it took a while to get through.
I actually kept falling asleep as I read it, which is unusual for me, But perhaps thats what Garcia would have wanted to happen, By reading his book, I slipped off into that nonworld of dreams and illusions, where the fantastic is commonplace and ice is something your father takes you to discover.



“Arcadio imposed obligatory military service for men over eighteen, declared to be public property any animals walking the streets after six in the evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands.
He sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of execution and prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells unless it was for a Liberal victory.
In order that no one would doubt the severity of his aims, he ordered a firing squad organized in the square and had it shoot a scarecrow.
At first no one took him seriously, ”.