Gabriel Garcia Marquez

100 yrs of solitude i was underwhelmed by when i read it a few years back, though it is my friend C's fave book ever and her taste is generally v sound, so i shd give it another go. i also recall chronicle of a death foretold was good, and my mum loved the autumn of the patriach, but i never got round to it personally.

You should care because he makes the impossible seem possible, or even logical. Because he makes the world seem a more magical place.

Love in the Time of Cholera is perhaps my favourite book ever (although I have about six of those).

I found this thread whilst searching for one about cheese. There is a cosmic significance in that. Oh yes.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400041341/ref=ase_thelibyrinth/002-1508273-7412021?v=glance&s=books

I love magic realism. Which is why I love this author.

I'm guessing you probably won't like it any more 2nd time, then...

i guess he said edith grossman's translations are so good that he prefers "hundred years" in translation.

Borges is the only author I've read in Spanish whose stuff originally written in Spanish loses something, though I can't really pinpoint what it is, in its translation to English. His translators have been pretty excellent, also.

earlier this morning i wanted to suggest "pedro paramo" by juan rulfo for anybody who thinks marquez is too twee.

im reading 100 years in english and ive got no feel for it, tho im a quarter of the way in. so episodic.

I enjoyed it the first time I read it in english but didn't really completely get it. I put this down to my age, I think I was 12 or 13 at the time, and further readings as I got older enhanced it. I now have a copy in the original Spanish annotated with lots of notes and etc. I think I can more fully appreciate it, has brought a lot of things in to focus that I had previously overlooked.

It's always seemed to me that it's Márquez's greatest work, it's his most dense and well thought through book. But I always preferred Love in the Time of Cholera which does a lot of the same things but is a lighter and more fun read.

i dont know if my spanish was ever good enough to read Marquez, or if it would still be now. ive been doing arbitration work from Venezuela for the past few months and reading spanish correspondence and law, but i suspect Marquez would do me in

I gotta finish this book (100 años...) I've been reading it for MONTHS on and off in Spanish but it's pretty slow going because it's so dense and Spanish isn't my first language. My ex bought me Cronica de una muerte anunciado too which I haven't even cracked.

His very short story "La luz es como el agua" (Light is like water?) is so good.

I loved 100 Years, so I decided to read more of his work. I picked up Autumn of the Patriarch, read about 100 pages of it, and never picked up another of his books. I may try reading some of his other books - I've heard since that Autumn is his most 'difficult'.

I've always thought that he's a great writer but hasn't written all that many novels that you should bother with. Just not very consistent, e.g. his last novel is one of the worst books I've ever read by a writer that I like that wasn't some form of juvenilia or something. Grotesque, badly-judged, fallen right off the deep end in to self-parody. Much of his work pre-100 years is just him figuring out how to get there and things like Autumn of the Patriarch and The General in His Labyrinth aren't bad, but far from essential. Would definitely say read Love in the Time of Cholera though.

A terrible day.

http://www.bigstory.ap.org/article/nobel-laureate-gabriel-garcia-marquez-dies-87

indeed. rip

Oh man, RIP. Autumn of the Patriarch is so great.

RIP :(

RIP

aw, RIP

I love his thought (iirc expressed in 100 YOS) that nobody really dies until the last person who remembered them alive dies.

"...and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

Just came to post the same thing, Michael. From the same speech:

Venerable Europe would perhaps be more perceptive if it tried to see us in its own past. If only it recalled that London took three hundred years to build its first city wall, and three hundred years more to acquire a bishop; that Rome labored in a gloom of uncertainty for twenty centuries, until an Etruscan King anchored it in history; and that the peaceful Swiss of today, who feast us with their mild cheeses and apathetic watches, bloodied Europe as soldiers of fortune, as late as the Sixteenth Century. Even at the height of the Renaissance, twelve thousand lansquenets in the pay of the imperial armies sacked and devastated Rome and put eight thousand of its inhabitants to the sword.

RIP, a great writer

:-(

One Hundred Years of Solitude really is a book for the ages.

:(

RIP :(

RIP

One Hundred Years overshadows everything else, but I remember Love in the Time of Cholera as equally vivid and more personal

a master of a kind we may never see again

Read El coronel no tiene quien le escriba in Spanish in high school for a class, and am forever grateful. A master of language.

RIP, changed my life permanently, gracias por todo, maestro!
Seeing his hometown from a bus window was quite memorable, now that I realize it happened 18 years ago. I have a lot of tortured love for Colombia and a lot of love for this particular Colombian, who inspired me to go there in the first place. 87 and at home sounds like an alright way to go, honestly.

The piece by Jameson only mentions 'magical realism' once (or at most twice) and there is a lot to be said for that.