Word: rquez
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa. 422 pages. Harper...
Gabriel Garcia Márquez spent the first eight years of his life in Aracataca, a steamy banana town not far from the Colombian coast. "Nothing interesting has happened to me since," he has said. His experiences there were eventually transformed into a tenderly comic novel, just published in the U.S. after three years of enormous success in Latin America. It has survived export triumphantly. In a beautiful translation, surrealism and innocence blend to form a wholly individual style. Like rum calentano, the story goes down easily, leaving a rich, sweet burning flavor behind...
Garcia Márquez's women are magnificent. Stern, stoic, preserved by duty and the dynastic urge, they struggle to keep their men sane. The primal mother Ursula, even at the age of 100, is so sure of her ways that no one realizes she is blind...
...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...