The premise of this story is nothing new. A man, desperate to reach enlightenment, seeks an ethereal grade of happiness, which set against the backgroThe premise of this story is nothing new. A man, desperate to reach enlightenment, seeks an ethereal grade of happiness, which set against the background of his human flesh, both eludes and haunts him. In hindsight, this text feels deeply narcissistic, there’s an unbroken (maybe unhealthy?) fascination with the self.
Yet, as spiritual books go, this tops the list as one of my favorites. It’s not just the intricate lessons grappled with in the story but the musicality of the text, the beautiful way language unfolds. It’s a book steeped in an old eloquence that feels dated but slips outside of time. The writing is lush, masterful but full of missteps, as if dubbed by an astute but non-native English speaker. Maybe it's the Siddhartha in me, or Siddhartha's timeless beat in midst of my daily noise, but this book really wowed me....more
The experience of Gabriel Garcia-Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is not one concerned with plot and narrative but with the lyrical and cyclicaThe experience of Gabriel Garcia-Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is not one concerned with plot and narrative but with the lyrical and cyclical nature of time. Having just peeled my eyes from the story's final page, it’s hard to remember exactly all that I read. Impossible (without consulting the outline of a family tree at the opening of the novel) to distinguish the similarly named characters one from the other.
The first time I read this book, I felt like it took a hundred years of solitude to finish it. Possibly because of my quiet obsession with rummaging my memory constantly, stumbling in the act of remembering to place each character in their appropriate place in time.
The second read, many years later, I’ve relinquished my feverish obsession with remembering. This go around I relaxed entirely into the fluid arms of the sparkling prose. Let myself drown. In its lucidity. Its vivid incoherence. Its absurdity. Its straight-faced, poignant humor.
On the surface, the story follows several generations of a Spanish speaking family whose progeny is fated to the torpor of solitude. José Arcadio Buendia (referred to always by all three parts of his name) is the founder of Macondo, a peaceful town whose layout, through the ingenuity of José’s restless mind, ensures each house is placed at a democratic distance from a river of clear running water. Incipiently, the town is quiet and unbothered except for periodic bouts of excitement and revelry brought on by gypsies and circus-like performers who bring a mixed-bag of extraordinary and ordinary things to the simple-minded people of Macondo.
One of the most fascinating aspects of this text is its convincing incoherence. The prose, though lucid, intersects with startling moments of things falling apart. Take, for example, a scene in the book when José Arcadio Buendia’s son goes wandering in search of the most beautiful woman on earth. The son's journey takes him to a distinct town where at one point his thoughts unravel at the seams. "He became lost in misty byways, in time reserved for oblivion, in labyrinths of disappointment. He crossed a yellow plain where the echo repeated one's thoughts and where anxiety brought on premonitory mirages." The son's hope like the language of the text disintegrates into an immaterial but convincing act of desolation. The reader is left impressed with a feeling, with the music of the prose, rather than certainty of anything solid.
The text is, majority of the time, an ambling, luminous landscape. The stream of third-person narrative is punctuated at key moments with piercing but plain-spoken dialogue, often poignant, hilarious, and full of depth. In one scene, when the defeated Colonel Aureliano Buendia learns that his father (now reduced to the figure of a ghost tied to a chestnut tree) fears Aureliano will be killed, the colonel smiles and assures the ghost of his father, “A man never dies when he should, but when he can.”
In Macondo, it seems everything is repeating itself. (So what’s the point of remembering?) The children take the name of their fathers. Mothers give birth. Not just to men. But to the memory of men. Recycling, without much novelty, the incestuousness of solitude and nostalgia....more
A rewrite I composed, addressed to my family, based on my experience with Yoko Ono's flowering poetry in Grapefruit:
PIECE FOR MY LITTLEST BROTHER Make A rewrite I composed, addressed to my family, based on my experience with Yoko Ono's flowering poetry in Grapefruit:
PIECE FOR MY LITTLEST BROTHER Make a mountain. Put the mountain outside. Hand out small portions to people who come to see it.
PIECE FOR MY OTHER LITTLE BRO Break big light into pieces. Put the pieces in an empty bag. Use pieces from the bag to fill empty conversation.
PIECE FOR MY FINE ASS SISTER Collect sounds you have heard throughout the week. Replay the sounds at fullblast while you laugh louder.
PIECE FOR GIDE, MY FATHER Call every day and talk about many things. Walk the distance of your conversation and back.
PIECE FOR MY OLDER BROTHER A tie is a deed. Gift one to your father on your sister’s wedding day. Gift one to yourself in the morning of the day.
PIECE FOR HURLANDE, MY MOTHER Listen to a heart beat. Write all the things you want to do. Make a beautiful thing happen by sunset.
PIECE Take every word you come across and chew the fruit of it.
Imagine life eclipsed by imagination. The bloodiest, the most beautiful, the most vulnerable imaginings, and the disintegration of wishes as we make tImagine life eclipsed by imagination. The bloodiest, the most beautiful, the most vulnerable imaginings, and the disintegration of wishes as we make them. This is how life unfolds in the mind of Jimmy Corrigan, the desolate main character in Chris Ware’s graphic novel. Jimmy speaks full sentences—only when he imagines. In his mind he has courage, kills people, commits suicide, has sex, and is “the smartest kid on earth.” In his actual life, Jimmy is a spineless, aging man, with no friends and no romantic ties. It is only with some courage and equal trepidation that a reader might see his/herself in Jimmy. With a little of both, I found that I could. And I did. It’s the language of this piece that I identify with most. This book assembles history, memory, and make-believe in such a poignant way. It speaks a language that reflects how we build the narrative of our own lives. A single moment in the novel can span across several illustrated panels that call the reader to absorb information—to taste and savor the moment—and hold off on situating it within the chronology of the story, at least not immediately. Jimmy’s imagination works alongside the narrative to shock and dissemble it. You never know what to expect. His imagination is so easily pierced, so fragile, that it bleeds. The image I see of this character, both figuratively and physically, is one of a big walking wound. Even in the story, Jimmy walks around bandaged most of the time.
As you may expect, this story is depressing. It’s not about plot or character development—these features of the narrative endure little change. Early on, we learn that Jimmy is abandoned by his father. A few pages in, we see Jimmy as an older, insecure, socially inept man. The story’s life carries on despairingly. Even after Jimmy gets a letter from his absent father inviting him to come visit, the father and son’s time together suffers from Jimmy’s volatile mind. Old memories, family history, and violent make-believe interrupt what could have been new development in the relationship between father and son. Time shifts between the past and present, with repeated returns to 1893 and the Chicago World’s Fair, the year Jimmy’s grandfather was also abandoned by his own father. We see here a pattern of father abandoning son. Jimmy remains lonely, unwanted, disturbed. He does not grow out of the mold. This instructs the reader not to wait for ‘what happens next’ but rather to give an eye to how moments flower. A single page may rest on capturing a memory, a sound, a place, even a bird, from different points-of-view. The sequence may be interrupted suddenly by a memory, by a violent wish. A new image may evoke a previous one, asking the reader to retrace his/her steps or to borrow and bring into play clips from an earlier scene. What’s special about the performance of this novel is that it uncannily reflects how we make into a story our own lives. It quietly captures how we edit our life time, moment by moment, on the fly, calling on memories, fears, visions, prophesies, to help us assimilate the conditions of our present world. This novel is visually and grammatically stunning. Yes, the story is deeply sad, but the language is arresting and beautiful. ...more
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