We live our lives between the margins of the improbable and the impossible, and that which is not impossible cannot be prevented from happening.
This sWe live our lives between the margins of the improbable and the impossible, and that which is not impossible cannot be prevented from happening.
This sprawling, playful, mock-serious yet philosophically profound novel follows multilinear trajectories that fuse into each other and diverge, to create a multimodal world, which comes across as surreal and hyper-real at the same time. Beyond the convention-bending form and style, the author has skillfully weaved criticisms of socio-religious dogmas and the political clown show that has dogged Pakistan for much of its history. This novel is many things at once and one of the best any language can produce.
[image] Márquez sends message to anyone who will attempt to write a romance novel after Love in the Time of Cholera.(view spoiler)[no offence intended[image] Márquez sends message to anyone who will attempt to write a romance novel after Love in the Time of Cholera.(view spoiler)[no offence intended to writers of romance. (hide spoiler)]
There are many wonderful reviews of the book on here, so I will abstain from indulging in lengthy reflections, but I cannot leave this space unfilled without recording a short paean born out of the immense aesthetic pleasure, and grief, and education, this book afforded me.
Stretching a notion to its limits would ultimately make it sufficiently unrealistic for ordinary mortals living the uneventful reality of moderation to check their imagination, but it is only through this agency can one expect to understand the full extent of the great illusions that frame and define life. Márquez weaves a rich, dense and unbroken interplay of themes – death, decay, sacrifice, patience, desire, obsession, wars, modernity, experiments on your sense of smell etc – in a story whose each part reads like a whole to inform on the essential romance of two, or three, protagonists inhabiting the wild heart of life.
To tell the story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza (how I love these poetic, smooth-sailing, metrical Hispanic names) Márquez does not need those abundant magical realist tricks up his sleeve; in this case he relies on his prodigious capacity to create an internal logic that, despite its unearthly stretch, enchants and entrances and bamboozles you with its powers of persuasion. It has the power to claim and possess your mindscape.
So what is this novel? It’s a story of love and it’s a story of everything besides love.
I do not claim a decent knowledge of world literature, being as I still am no more than half a decade old in mReality takes shape in the memory alone.
I do not claim a decent knowledge of world literature, being as I still am no more than half a decade old in my English-language readings, so my acquaintance with A-class writers remains, at best, sketchy; but I feel no hesitation in claiming that there are two writers - Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov - who make all wannabes look like silly dilettantes, whose artistic range, sheer eloquence and fierce intelligence have such a deleterious effect on so many shining "bestselling" authors that they come across as little more than teaboys and bargirls in Café Littérature.
Having seen disappointing reviews of a couple of my friends whose opinions I value, I approached À la recherche du temps perdu prepared to dislike it eventually, to declare my inability to penetrate its thickly woven states of consciousness glimpsed through a multitude of roundabout analogies and metaphorical slants, to take issue with the elasticity of prose stretching, like an intricately designed arithmetic equation, into clauses and sub-clauses, one set within another, and another within yet another, so that when you read the last clause it's connection with the opening one appears precariously tenuous. This might be due to the inability of English to accommodate the original French. Even if it is not, as I read I discovered an easy solution to this mathematical construction of Proust's prose: if I lost the thread by the end of the paragraph-long sentence I could always go back and re-read it!
But this happened rarely. Proust for the most remains very accessible despite the sheer intricacies of his calligraphic writing, whose prose at first glance gives an impression of labyrinthine ruins of an excavated settlement from ancient times whose topography you're at great pains to decipher but, without much effort, you find yourself unraveling the hidden secret of the relic that once was a living, breathing place with souls in flesh and bones walking about the business of life, whose soft footfalls you hear in the dead of night as your eyes glide on the text, whose breath you feel on the nape of your neck as you scratch it with the tip of the lead pencil, whose cries of pain and desire spin your heart into an orbital motion around a simple question turned into a tangle of answers, and whose mental universes come alive in quantum-level struggle against the perennial questions of existence on the surface of the skeletal remains of temples and forgotten pleasure-houses that once were.
By the time I finished the first installment I understood very well that Marcel Proust is most certainly and most undoubtedly one of the finest artists known to us, a prose stylist like none other. I'd take this opportunity to sing a paean to French writers; the more I read French and their British counterparts of the 19th century the more I'm convinced of the artistic superiority of the former over the latter. Call it my bias, and so be it. Yes, Dickens is great, Mary Ann Evans too, and a few others, but if you only read British classics and nothing else. (view spoiler)[I desperately hope that French originals rendered into English do not suffer from the modernising whitwwash in contemporary translations; I do hope that when we read Flaubert and Proust in English we're are actually reading them and not their translators. It is for this reason I shunned the newer translation of ISoLT and opted for C.K. Scott Moncrieff's (hide spoiler)].
I realise I haven't said anything on "themes" and "content" of the novel. But does it matter? For me, nope, it doesn't. For me, it is the writing that suggests the themes and ideas not the other way round; and the ideas this piece of literature suggests resist any attempt at paraphrasing (All you can do is select moments of brilliance to discuss, and there are plenty of them at hand). If pressed, what would I say? First half is a recounting of the story of a perspicacious and insecure adolescent who tells us about his holidays with his immediate family at his aunt's country place in Combray and the second part involves a man called Swann on whom love has inflicted its violence despite his pretentious aloofness. Unimpressive? So simple? Yes, nothing to be excited about if you're looking for a formulaic story that caters to mass market tastes with its three-stepped start-middle-end sort construction held up by the myth of rounded characters and told with a minimal tweaking of the convention which is no more than a dull rehash of the popular novel.
“What happened?" “Nothing happened.” “Why did nothing happen? “How would I know?” “You would know.” “I would?” “Yes.” “How I would know?” “Because you read it“What happened?" “Nothing happened.” “Why did nothing happen? “How would I know?” “You would know.” “I would?” “Yes.” “How I would know?” “Because you read it.” “Did I?” “Yes.“ “How do you know?” “It is on your shelf.” “So?” “You rated it.” “What does it mean?” “It means you have read it.” “Oh I have.” “So what happened?” “Nothing happened.” “Why did nothing happen?” “Because they were waiting for Godot.”
Waiting and nothing – I could take these two words and use them in as many combinations as the rules of probability allow to create a ‘review’ that would be as much meaningful as it would be meaningless. I could draw upon the elusive symbolism of the text in the manner of a perspicacious hermeneut whose convoluted exegesis would only serve to frustrate him even more. Or like a blurb-writer I could summarise the four-and-a-half characters, the austere landscape, the leafless tree, the role of the taut rope and jangling bucket, and the heap of nonsense, but what would that achieve?
Suffice it to say that the sheer speed of the bare dialogue makes you want to slow down and look for something queer happening between the lines, but nothing happens. Or perhaps everything happens? You can look at from any number of angles and it adapts itself to your point of view. You can attach any meaning to the memorable symbolism and it helps you comprehend that meaning. You may hypothesize at will and the text will lend you a hand to prove it.
Beckett in his frugal minimalist brilliance paints a powerful imagery of an agitated self, a helpless being, a lonely traveller, in eternal yet meaningless wait, which life ultimately is, till we take the final leap into oblivion. The act of wait, which is an act of life, is given a comic dimension in the play. By the end the reader becomes one with the characters, waiting for things to happen, for something to happen, but nothing ever happens. Yet life happens.
I think it's impossible to review Waiting for Godot adequately, not even after a long and thorough analysis, because in that case one would be seeking directions where none exist.
The best review of the play is the one that is not written.
For a long time I could not find words to write anything on One Hundred Years of Solitude, for Marquez mesmerised me into a silence I didn't know how For a long time I could not find words to write anything on One Hundred Years of Solitude, for Marquez mesmerised me into a silence I didn't know how to break. But I have been commenting here and there on Goodreads and now it is good time, finally, to gather my thoughts in one piece. But this somewhat longer review is more a labour of love than a coherent attempt to review his opus.
Marquez resets the history of universe such that the old reality ceases to exist and a new parallel world is born in which things do not conform to obsolete, worn-out laws. Everything in this world is to be discovered anew, even the most primary building block of life: water. Macondo is the first human settlement of Time Immemorial set up by the founding fathers of the Buendia family. It is a place where white and polished stones are like ‘prehistoric eggs’; an infant world, clean and pure, where ‘many things lack names.’ And it is natural that here, in the farther reaches of marshland prone to cataclysmic events, the mythscape of One Hundred Years of Solitude should come into existence.
The tone of this epic and picaresque story is set ab initio. Take a gander at this:
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.
It is not long before fateful human activity mars the innocent beauty of creation. The more they discover the more they are sucked into the inescapable cycle of life. The primordial myth that moulds and shapes their destinies does not let them advance in their efforts to defeat the infernal solitude of existence, whatever they might do, however they might try. History gets back at them again and again and every generation is but a repeat of the past. It is to emphasise the cyclical nature of time, in my opinion, that names of principal characters are repeated in every generation, sometimes to the confusion of the reader, easily rectified by going back to the family tree provided in the start of the book.
An external, portentous, disastrous, evil-like power guides and transforms the lives of people in the hamlet of Macondo. The sense of foreboding pervades the whole story: the rain continuing for many days and inundating the streets, the unceasing storm before the arrival in town of a heraldic character, and the fearful episode when townspeople begin to suffer a terrible memory loss, so that to remember the names and functions of things they write it down on labels and tie those labels to objects like chairs and tables. It tells us that we cannot hope for a future if our past is erased from the slates of our collective consciousness. Past may be a burden but it is also a great guiding force without which there's no future.
The only way to retain your sanity is to remember your history and cling to it, or prepare to go insane. When one Jose Arcadio Buendia loses the memory of things, he goes mad:
Jose Arcadio Buendia conversed with Prudencio Aguilar until the dawn. A few hours later, worn out by the vigil, he went into Aureliano’s workshop and asked him: “What day is today?” Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday. “I was thinking the same thing,” Jose Arcadio Buendia said, “but suddenly I realized that it’s still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the begonias. Today is Monday too.” On the next day, Wednesday, Jose Arcadio Buendia went back to the workshop. “This is a disaster,” he said. “Look at the air, listen to the buzzing of the sun, the same as yesterday and the day before. Today is Monday too.” That night Pietro Crespi found him on the porch, weeping for…his mother and father. On Thursday he appeared in the workshop again with the painful look of plowed ground. “The time machine has broken,” he almost sobbed,…he spent six months examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.
The town is threatened when the change taking place in the outside world begins to spill over into Macondo. Here we have a metaphor for the struggle of Maruqez’s native country and continent which is passing through internecine wars on its way toward externally imposed modernity. Divisions that hitherto did not exist come to define the inhabitants of Macondo and of towns farther afield. One of the Buendias, Colonel Aureliano, takes up a piece of metalwork as new and strange as a gun to mount a revolt and bring the promised glory to his land. New lines are drawn. New alliances are made. Old friends become enemies and enemies, partners. Colonel Aureliano Buendia, when he is about to kill him, tells General Moncada:
Remember, old friend, I'm not shooting you. It's the revolution that's shooting you.
The scene above captures the mechanistic element of their revolutionary war; the one below bares the meaninglessness of the conflict, so pertinent to the 20th century militarisation of the whole continent and its endless armed strife led by colonels and generals of all hues and shades.
Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?" What other reason could there be?" Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. "For the great Liberal party." You're lucky because you know why," he answered. "As far as I'm concerned, I've come to realize only just now that I'm fighting because of pride." That's bad," Colonel Gerineldo Marquez said. Colonel Aureliano Buendia was amused at his alarm. "Naturally," he said. "But in any case, it's better than not knowing why you're fighting." He looked him in the eyes and added with a smile: Or fighting, like you, for something that doesn't have any meaning for anyone.”
Although I tried to avoid getting into this discussion, but a review of this work is not possible without throwing in the inevitable buzzword – magical realism. Although the book gets high praise from most readers, it is to be expected that some readers would take a disliking to the basic ingredients from which Marquez draws his style and narrative devices. I want to address in particular one argument from the naysayer camp that pops up again and again: it is not realistic; it can’t happen; this is not how things work. So I ask (and try to answer): what is it with our obsession with “realism” that makes some of us reject the conceptual framework of this novel?
Aristotle in Poetics argues that a convincing impossibility in mimesis is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility. The stress is not on what can physically happen but on mimetic persuasion. This is why some novels that follow every bit of convention, every bit of realistic element in them turn out to be unbelievable stories with unbelievable characters. You want to forget them as soon as you finish the book – and toss it aside. But on the other hand Greek tragedies populated with cosmic characters pulling suprahuman feats continue to enthrall generations of readers. How realistic are those stories? It is the writer’s task to convince us that this could have happened in a world he has created and set the rules for. In that Marquez is more than successful, and this is the basis of the enduring appeal of this work.
The distinction fell into place for me when I replaced ‘realism’ with ‘truth.’ Kafka’s haunting stories are so far from the 19th century convention of realism we have come to accept as the basis of novel-writing. His The Metamorphosis is not a representation of likely human activity (how could a human transform overnight into a large insect?) but it is nonetheless a harrowingly truthful story that advances existential dilemmas and makes a statement on human relationships, familial in particular. We say this is how it would feel like to be an outcast from one’s family. Or consider Hamsun’s Hunger in which a starving man puts his finger in his mouth and starts eating himself. In the ‘real’ world Kafka’s, Hamsun’s and Marquez’s characters cannot exist but the effect of their existence on us is as truthful and real as the dilemmas of any great realistic character ever created.
Marquez, like a god, has written the First Testament of Latin America, synthesising myth and magic to reveal the truth of the human condition, and called it One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Márquez's oeuvre may be roughly divided into two streams of writing: the magician of One Hundred Years of SoThere had never been a death so foretold.
Márquez's oeuvre may be roughly divided into two streams of writing: the magician of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera and the journalist-adventurer of this novel and News of a Kidnapping. The ominous world of magic realism closes shop when Marquez switches his gears to journalistic storytelling. But may be not quite; because right from the opening scene an eerie premonition trails at the heels of Santiago Nasar and, do what he might, catches him unawares to punish him for a crime he might or might not have committed. In this novella the writer-narrator sets himself up to the task of investigating the events that led to the death so foretold.
You may call it a reportage of an impossible and inexplicable murder that could have been prevented with just a shout. You may call it story of a man who must pay for violating the unwritten code of honour when he is suspected of deflowering Angela Vicario, his best pal's sister, hours before she was to get married to another man. Or you may simply call it a story of an honour killing, but unlike other stories of this kind this is not yet another banal attempt aimed at soliciting public's disgust at the horrific practice, told from the moral high ground of an observer's point of view. It does not portray the entire value system backward and barbaric which stories of this kind are wont to do, but operates from inside the culture to report on the dynamics that lead to and make something like this possible. This objectivity sits at the heart of good writing and this sets Márquez apart from a bevy of writers who have produced stereotypical fictional accounts of a culture at war with itself.
I won't call it "unreliable narration" but rather a deliberate building up of ambiguity with respect to the victim's role: Was Santiago Nasar guilty of dishonouring Angela Vicario, or was there a big misunderstanding all along, made all the more complicated by a surfeit of circumstantial evidence? Here you have Márquez, the master investigative journalist, with the best implements of his trade, testing your powers of observation and turning you into a witness who is being strung along willy-nilly by a powerful voice. It's one of those novels where the process of telling a story is greater than the story itself. In other words, how it's told rather than what's told.
By the honour of Angela Vicario this is a story unequaled in its telling!...more
After all is said and done, what I find most ironic about the legacy of 1984 is the wholesale adoption of mass surveillance reThat was doubleplusgood!
After all is said and done, what I find most ironic about the legacy of 1984 is the wholesale adoption of mass surveillance regimes in liberal democracies, notably but not exclusively in the Western world. Obviously new tech has allowed this to be done much more discreetly but the extent to which it has become normal to be surveilled in The Free World™ is not what Orwell would have anticipated when he sat down to satirise it in the Communist countries....more
Arguably the best novel of Orhan Pamuk. Set in Istanbul during the height of Ottoman power, this novel is a tribute to the art of painting as well as Arguably the best novel of Orhan Pamuk. Set in Istanbul during the height of Ottoman power, this novel is a tribute to the art of painting as well as a fascinating murder mystery which will keep you hooked till the end. The unusual narrative is felt with full force right from the start - as you read the first chapter, starting with the voice of a corpse at the bottom of the well wondering who was the wretched man that killed him.
Then ensues a beautiful exploration of the 16th century Istanbul's art scene, its many rivalries, and in between breaths a heartfelt love story that keeps the main protagonist on his heels, as he finds his way through the internecine politics at home and at court. This story is a fascinating example of the possibilities of modern global novel. Must read. ...more
Loading...
