Word: aureliano
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This kind of time is mythic, biblical, fairy tale time. In a mysterious way it preserves instead of oppressing; the men of Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel--not a Buendia among them--are all slaves of a destructive sort of time. The remnants of Aureliano's revolutionary army are tricked into waiting paralyzed for a promised pension that never arrives. The whole town waits for death--the individual or collective crisis that might give them a sense of direction, something to fight against--and when death comes it comes as an anticlimax. The "leaf storm...
...Buendias of One Hundred Years of Solitude were a superhuman dynasty, and they lived out their one hundred years as if they were in their natural element. Fifty years passed, but Aureliano went on making little gold fishes and planning for a "mortal con-flagration that would wipe out all vestiges of a regime of corruption." Fifty years of wind and rain passed, and Aureliano's father remained tied to the tree in the yard. "Four years, eleven months, and two days" of rain flooded the town, but his mother kept the house dry and safe...
...Aureliano's revolution was the only possible apocalypse and that revolution failed. So the town moves from one false apocalypse to another, and the epic tragedy of One Hundred Years of Solitude degenerates into comedy. Instead of the promised return of the magician Melquiades, who brought the first ice to Macondo, the senile priest decries the reappearance of the Wandering Jew--a bewildered adolescent who is the first visitor in 20 years to stay overnight in Macondo's only hotel. At last the promised end becomes pure satire at the conclusion of No One Writes to the Colonel...
...civility. One searches in vain for the raffish Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude-modeled on the banana boom town of Aracataca, where the author was born. Macondophiles will at least learn some new bits and pieces about the place. The action starts with a note from Colonel Aureliano Buendia, the great revolutionary warrior who returns in Solitude, and the recluse Rebeca also makes an ectoplasmic appearance...
...range and length, the book is satisfyingly cohesive where it might be sprawling. The key to this unity is Garcia Márquez's treatment of time. Consider the superb opening sentence: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Such compression of time makes the novel taut with a sense of fate. Atavistic dictates of blood must be followed. Premonitions invariably come true. A series of coded predictions, written when Macondo was still young, are deciphered only when every prediction...