Word: macondo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Neruda's work can speak best to those who already share his principles; Borges's work has no political message. Garcia's method is to allow his readers to believe that they are not reading politics at all, only simple, romantic tales of life in the fictional village of Macondo. Within these stories, however, Garcia explains a good deal about the social and historical background of contemporary Latin America. And it serves the U.S. right that the great American novel turned out to be a South American one. Garcia's One Hundred Years of Solitude is the only book...
...forces suppressed the Chilean government in the coup of September, 1973. As he traces the contacts between Chilean military officers and the Pentagon, it seems that Garcia is portraying the military men of his fiction all over again. These are the same men who shot three thousand people in Macondo's central square and carted them off in a freight train, and the next morning denied that the massacre had ever occurred. The politics of One Hundred Years of Solitude seem mythic, distanced from contemporary issues and personalities; but the massacre of that hot Sunday afternoon is something destined...
...Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel shouldn't be mistaken for out-takes or early sketches for either of the larger books. They explore some of the paths that Garcia couldn't follow up in One Hundred Years of Solitude. That book was self-contained: Garcia chronicled Macondo from its beginning to its destruction by an apocalyptic storm. Now he wants to see what would have happened if the apocalypse had proved false, if the people of Macondo had been forced to live through another century of heat, decay, and silence...
...book, which contains a novella and six stories, is in most ways a letdown. Leafstorm, the long work, is also about Macondo, but it is an early, earnest exercise in which three narrators-a boy, his mother and his grandfather-recall the old man's efforts to give a decent burial to an outcast whom the town wants to leave to the vultures...
...rilled with undifferentiated nostalgia-for old values, old vitality, old 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...