How was this book lit?
How was this book lit?
Leo Davis
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Brayden Williams
If you are a 14 year old latin-american schoolgirl, this is the book for you.
Kayden Adams
Here we go. One of the best books of all time is not good for user simply because is actually enjoyed by many people around the globe, and not just a few literature students and scholars.
Face it: the guy hit the nail in the head. He composed a work that was an instant hit, immediately hailed by the critics as a masterpiece and seen not only in the tables of professors and scholars, but also on the grocery-bags of housewife’s and in the nightstands of the humble rooms of prostitutes.
It has it all: an absorbing narrative, great characters, poetic language and a brand new mythology.
The book was heavily inspired by Faulkner and yet achieved much more than Faulkner. Is probably superior to any American novel.
Juan Hughes
>brand new mythology
The realismo mágico is a mere caricature of what the latinamerican experience is.
Camden Gutierrez
Landon Harris
it's literally one of the best books ever written and if you know a bit about the history of colombia it makes it much more meaningful
try something like short walks from bogota by tom feiling for a bit of context
you're an idiot
Nathan Cruz
primarily indirectly, but there are some sconces at play and the highlights were brought out with a combination of Carbide and Tungsten-Halogens behind 2 sheet layers consisting of Gobos and pale blue gel translucencies.
Carter Green
It's good, not sure about translations, though
Cooper Moore
This one?
>My impression when I read it was that I was witnessing humanity first emerging from primordial mud, from the creamy swamps of stone age, as if the foundation of the city of Macondo was the first settlement of civilization and it’s inhabitants were all Adams and Eves, all of them still humid with the sweat of the dew of paradise. Is like the children of Eden modeling and pilling up the first bricks of Ur, or Uruk, of Nineveh or Babylon (all the houses of red mud and of bamboo/taquara).
Humanity was at the same time more innocent and stronger, more ignorant and hungrier. The friendship and the butchery, the marriage and drinking rituals, the sexual hunger and the love caresses, the trades and crafts and arts and festivals: all of it seemed, in my eyes, as discovered for the first time by the inhabitants of the world of this book. When they made love, they did it with more power and pleasure than our current race; when they killed, they did it with more foaming savagery. Their veins still had primeval magma snaking and tingling inside them; their arteries still burned with an effervescence contaminated with the sweat of minotaur’s and the menstrual blood of sirens. It is a book that portrays a period in history but with the taste of something that came before history, before civilization, before the written word, before the invention of time. The first settlers, with the first house-foundations, will be the ones who will finally make time open its eyes and start growing conscious – as if, the soil being perforated to seat the first beams, time started to gush off, like newfound petroleum.
>It begins with creation. Even the fauna and flora, with plants with tick and oozing blood of milk, flowers with golden pollen, butterflies and mosquitos emerging like dense fog, and the birds singing on the branches, the tamarins jumping from tree to tree, the fat salamanders crawling in the viscous vegetation, the araras (macaws) whose flesh is blue and taste like musk: this environment seemed as the original jungles of Eden before the fall of humanity. It begins with creation, but it will march inexorably until the crack of doom.
Juan Bailey
>And then you get the same errors and weaknesses happening again and again and again, by generation after generation of characters, as if didn’t matter how much civilization changed, for the original and primeval world (where things still didn’t had a name, where men and women needed to point to indicate what they were referring to) could never be completely silenced. No matter how much technology and “progress” fertilized the world, still the original marrow of our bestial beings could never be suppressed: it kept screaming inside the bones and veins of the men and women of the book. Like the sweet and nauseating pulp of guava, there is no way to wash the taste, the nausea and the sweetness from this the people who are still and forever tattooed by the Dionysian stamp of the state-of-nature.
So this:
a) The sperm of Adam could never be dissolved from our species; the perfume of the apple never gagged, for it is forever entangled in our flesh: that seems to me one of the great themes of the book.
b) Somehow I feel that the author desired to portray the whole history of humanity – from the first shadows that crawled from the marshes of Eden (the slimy early-fishes creeping from sea to land), to the last cries of the last infants and the last whispers of the last ancients (whose backs carry the weight of all the thousands that lived before them) – occurring in one single town, during the course of mere 100 years.
It’s a great book.
Jason Ross
you won't miss anything by ignoring it. only relevant for those who can identify with its experience, but it has no timeless relevance for humanity.
only latinamericans or students of hispanic lit will find it relevant.
Jeremiah Ross
>you won't miss anything by ignoring it.
You can say the same about any work of literature.
>only relevant for those who can identify with its experience, but it has no timeless relevance for humanity.
Ok, so what writers are relevant for all the human race, and why those specially?
>only latinamericans or students of hispanic lit will find it relevant.
Only brits will find Shakespeare relevant. Only Russians will find Tolstoy relevant.
Camden Martin
Wow, found the butthurt hispanic lit major
Parker Ortiz
I’m a layer.
Just admit it, you are the one who is butt-hurt because some obscure guy from Colombia wrote a better novel than any American.
Justin Carter
I'm not the same guy that wrote the other post. I'm from Argentina, so...
Caleb Green
Also, I'm from Italy. Shakespeare and Tolstoy are my favorite writers.
Levi Jenkins
Dont understand it. The whole time I was reading it I felt like a trick was being pulled on me in terms of waiting for the supposed greatness to kick in only to realize im on last page of this offensively average book and it still hasnt happened. Plastic characters, poor world-building, no sense for rhythm and light and shade. Remains in my memory for being the first book where I without a doubt felt it was a fraud relative to its standing in literary community.
Thomas Cruz
dont get angry cause you dont have real arguments.
only the works that reach the timeless human principles through their specific paths are worth considering beyond the specific context that gave them birth. latinamerica is still far from that, the keep taking their little mind images for the world itself and can only see life through them. like any random tribe, only they build their images not based on nature but based on other peoples images.
Alexander Powell
>only latinamericans or students of hispanic lit will find it relevant.
>That's your opinion—I beg to differ
Signed: The World
theguardian.com
Jeremiah Long
bla bla bla
They did it, end of story.
Still waiting to see the real geniuses and know why they are the real deal.
Just like this user pointed out:
The world does not agree with your view. You can go back to /pol/ now.
Elijah Ross
My college roomie was obsessed with those page long sentences and ornate descriptions, he used to read them aloud all the time, and want to be able to write like that so badly that although he was widely sought after by pretty much every girl on campus, he would invariably spend friday & saturday nights pounding entire fifths of bacardi to the face and eating TOO MANY of these huge orange rolaid-looking 30 mg adderall tablets, cause he thought that being jacked and drunk was like finding the mario bros' Warp Zone', but for aspiring writers.
I was never too into it, probably because that whole style and setting seems a bit too highly regarded by mainstream normies who don't actually grok it but know that they should.
Damn, that kid could kill an months entire scrip of addy and and 4 5ths of Bacardi in one weekend. I watched him during finals week when I'd finished all my work and I was CERTAIN he was just gonna, like, drop. At any moment.
Caleb Parker
it is funny how insecure people get so defensive when their image is questioned. this always happens with latinos. you can only get a sense of existence by others people recognition.
whatever, keep telling yourselves that your small accomplishments are something, keep comparing them to the real accomplishments of real nations, and you will never become one.
Aiden Peterson
>only the works that reach the timeless human principles through their specific paths
What does that mean?
The books speaks of sex, love, hate, envy, aspiration, delusions, fears, loneliness, ambition, power-seeking, etc. All of them are timeless human principles.
Isn’t Tolstoy great because he speaks of the same things but in the lives of the Aristocrats of Russia, or the peasant class of Russia? He too is talking about people living in that time period and in that place on Earth, yet we feel it’s just as it always was for human beings all over the world.
>latinamerica is still far from that, the keep taking their little mind images for the world itself and can only see life through them
I think you are quite biased. You are not judging the book for itself. It’s pretty obvious that right from the start (assuming you read the book) you thought to yourself “This was written by a writer from this shithole place that is Latin America, so it cannot be as good as people say it is. I just know I will find it teeming with defects and faults”.
Is the same thing that many people here do when they read the work of women. It’s quite sad, actually, for it shows more of your own limitations than that of the writers in question.
Jacob Morgan
What newsgroup did you take this from?
David Campbell
>The books speaks of sex, love, hate, envy, aspiration, delusions, fears, loneliness, ambition, power-seeking, etc. All of them are timeless human principles.
god... stopped reading there.
yeah whatever you say.
Benjamin Hernandez
>keep comparing them to the real accomplishments of real nations,
hahaha
Grow up, mamas boy.
In the end everybody is alone. Just because I’m Italian it doesn’t mean that I am Michelangelo, or Dante, or Leonardo. When I sit down to work it is up to me to do the job. All the history of Rome, the Renascence, all of that was made by other people, not me. I need to prove myself, not to hide under the skirt of my “nation”.
Marquez was a great writer, and he his magnum opus is superior to all your Hemingway’s and Fitzgerald’s.
But you can go now, go tell yourself that you are better than others because “muh nation” and “muh ancestors”. Meanwhile One Hundred Years of Solitude is still selling thousands of copies and being discussed in every literature course in the world.
That small Latino guy was much brighter than you will ever be. But, hey, at least you can say you are American, right?
Aiden Flores
I don't do that.
Drug abuse isn't that uncommon, even abuse of this magnitude. And in a small, overpriced NY art/writing focused college?
Dude was quite a gym rat otherwise. Shit he was up to woulda killed me several times, but I'm relatively frail by comparison.
Bentley Peterson
damn dude you fuckin got him
Angel Wood
I enjoyed it. I do understand the common criticism that it can be hard to keep up with the story because of all the similar names, but I never found it annoying.
Charles Peterson
It's still good as an adult?
Cooper Turner
I was with you until
>probably better than any american novel
Michael Phillips
Not him but i honestly think that only Moby Dick can compete with 100 Years.
Parker Perry
What about Gravity's Rainbow?
Gavin Thompson
Mexican here, which makes me Latin American. I don't get the criticism that you need to be from LatAm to care for this book. In fact, as a Mexican I don't really identify with it on a cultural level but I can see why some Mexicans might do, but this is because this book is not a local thing, it's a universal thing. That said, I enjoyed the book, particularly the first half (up to the colonel's suicide attempt, which is my favorite chapter). When I finished it I thought the second half was a bit not too interesting for me, except for the final chapter and especially those final words I will remember forever ([...] because the lineages condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth), and then I understood this book is bit like life, we begin with hopes and expectations like the founders of Macondo, then we develop yada yada yada and then we fall into decadence and oblivion. I think this is one of those books where your opinion of it changes depending on how old you were when you read it. I don't know if it's the best Spanish-language novel or the best 20th century novel, but it's certainly one of the most ambitious ones.
(not arguing with you, just throwing ideas around lol)