Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Cien años de soledad


I am proud to announce that I have finished reading my first full book in Spanish, and amazingly enough, I have started high, with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 years of solitude. It took me roughly a week to finish the book, and my verdict is that the book is good, but not as good as many people make it out to be. One may argue that my less than perfect knowledge of Spanish made me miss the poetic elements in it, but in all honesty, this is bullcrap. The story is interesting enough to keep me gripped, and the analogies with Latin American aesthetic and events is interesting, but it is not, as one person suggested, a book that should be compulsory reading for all humanity.

What amazed me was the way in which relationships are formed throughout the book. My girlfriend tells me that Hispanic America is very conservative, but Marquez clearly begs to differ, because his characters are specialists on incest and inbreeding like the inhabitants of a backwards Louisiana Swamp, as can be seen by the family tree of the main characters' family which I gracefully stole from the wikipedia.

1 comment:

Bueno said...

This is one of the best book I've ever read. I don't know why but i like this kind of "generation" novels like "O Continente".

I read it in Portuguese, but I'm pretty sure that Spanish version is even better.