I was originally planning on making this microblog about the historical events behind 100 Years of Solitude with a look into the effects of "banana republics," but I found myself dreading writing it because...
Well, history can be kind of boring (sorry, Mr. McDaniels).
So instead, today's topic is snark and humor. 100 Years of Solitude, despite being a rather sad and melancholic book, is surprisingly rife with humor. There's literally a character named Meme (which for whatever reason I find endlessly amusing), but aside from that, my favorite element of humor is the dialogue. Marquez may use dialogue very sparingly, but when he does, it's always succinct and a punch to the gut, though usually in a more heart-wrenching sense. In addition, Marquez's writing as a whole is one of the most "quotable" things I've ever read. I could go on and on about the millions of quotes I jotted down because I just had to have a record of them, but I already waste enough time as is getting off topic.
Anyways, I always enjoy looking back at the notes I took while reading and coming across my favorite little tidbits of humor, like these three gems:
- “In the den that smelled of camphorated cobwebs he found himself facing a kind of dusty iguana whose lungs whispered when he breathed” (103).
- I'm dying--Aureliano literally called the guy a "dusty iguana"; that's officially my new favorite insult
- I love how the liberal agenda includes really intense stuff like assassination but also "instituting free love" (105).
- Whatever "free love" means I want it to happen
- Amaranta was on the point of causing panic because one of the nuns went into the kitchen as she was salting the soup and the only thing that occurred to her to say was to ask what those handfuls of white powder were. 'Arsenic,' Amaranta answered." (261).
- Wow what a mood
Pretty much all of my favorite lines and scenes come from Ursula, the matriarch of the Buendia family:
- 100 - this is super random, but I love that Ursula’s just like That MomTM, y’know, the helicopter mom who never lets her daughter out of sight
- “Ursula recognized in his affected way of speaking the languid cadence of the stuck-up people from the highlands. ‘As you say, mister,’ she accepted” (127).
- I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love Ursula
- “Let’s hope he becomes a priest so that God will finally come into this house” (188).
- Ursula is honestly just the gift that keeps on giving
Plus, those brief little flashes of humor were a nice respite from when I was drowning in a jumble of characters who are all named Aureliano and in really delightful but long-winded prose.
I'll end this behemoth of a blog post here (Microblog? Who is she?) with my absolute favorite passage: Fernanda’s iconic rant. Passive aggressive, sarcastic, and snarky, it’s exactly my kind of humor. Plus, it's got a real rant-y quality to it what with all the run-on sentences and colloquial phrases (similar to my natural writing style). It spans over 3 pages, but as teenagers, no one here has the attention span for that. However, I think this gives you a pretty good idea of it:
“[Fernanda was] a servant in a madhouse, with a lazy, idolatrous, libertine husband who lay on his back waiting for bread to rain down from heaven while she was straining her kidneys trying to keep afloat a home held together with pins where there was so much to do… yet no one ever said to her, ‘Good morning, Fernanda, did you sleep well? [...] She had not been able to tolerate it any more when that evil Jose Arcadio Segundo said that the damnation of the family had come when it opened its doors to a stuck-up highlander, just imagine, a stuck-up highlander, Lord save us, a highland daughter of evil spit of the same stripe as the highlanders the government sent to kill workers, you tell me, and he was referring to no one but her... who was the only mortal creature in that town full of bastards who did not feel all confused at the sight of sixteen pieces of silverware” (322).
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