Unknown Melancholies

Hello and welcome!

Today's microblog is a double-whammy: a combination of a mini-lesson on magical realism and an update on my attempts to not skim this whole book. How exciting! (I say as I wonder how I'm realistically supposed to cram both of these into a 15-minute blog post.)

The author of 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, is credited with bringing to literature an entirely new genre: magical realism. The genre is characterized by the use of realistic narrative and naturalistic technique with elements of fantasy. Essentially, it's where the miraculous and the real converge.

According to Márquez, magical realism sprang from Latin Amercia's history, from its vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries to its long years of hunger, illness and violence. When he accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, he said, “Poets and beggars, musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination. For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

The convergence of the real and surreal is one of the most intriguing aspects of 100 Years of Solitude. In the early days of the Buendia family (of whom the book centers on), their town is often visited by a troop of gypsies who bring with them wonders from far and wide. Their goods include both the scientific and the unexplainable, yet both are treated with the same curious awe. In fact, of all the things the gypsies bring (including magical flying carpets), it's ice that's proclaimed to be "the great invention of the time." No one ever questions the town's strange and fantastical occurrences such as the flowers that rain from the sky, the contagious insomnia plague, or the levitating priest. Márquez's writing is peculiar and unexpected but surprisingly addicting.

As for my attempts to start "actually reading" and to keep a running side commentary, it's been going pretty well so far. My reading speed has slowed down drastically. While I don't love that it sometimes takes me over half an hour to get through 10 or 15 pages, it's better than never knowing what's going on. Plus, I love having a record of all my favorite quotes (some of which I've included below) as well as a place to dump all of the random musings and ideas I have while reading, even if it's just little things like, "Why does Ursula think everything can be solved with egg whites???"

Favorite Quotes:

• "He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude" (53).
• "He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians” (75).
• "...he could not understand how people arrived at the extreme of waging war over things that could not be touched with the hand" (100).
• "...she had the rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment" (116).
• "What worries me is that out of so much hatred for the military... you've ended up as bad as they are. And no ideal in life is worth that much baseness" (163).
• "Let's hope that he becomes a priest so that God will finally come into this house" (188).