Monthly Archives: February 2023

García Márquez

Week 7: One Hundred Years of Solitude and Spiral

The first half of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez was a vibrant and overwhelming ride. It felt as if the narrative spun into chaos within the first 30 pages. It was beautiful to experience but also disorienting and somewhat tedious. Like the title suggests, and as Jon mentioned in his lecture, the greatest enemy of the characters (and the readers) here is tedium. A slow-boiling circus of chaotic personalities and circumstances that never seems to progress past its repeated mistakes.

Given the nature of magical realism and also the events of this novel, I found it difficult to differentiate the momentous from the mundane. Metaphorically speaking, García Márquez’s writing was extremely saturated and rich – it felt like a deluge of vivid colors – and hence, at times I wanted to put on sunglasses to mitigate the blinding intensity. Even the syntax of García Márquez’s writing seemed to contribute to this flood of imagery. He crafts his narrative through large blocks of text in which context, points of view, and time periods can fluctuate without apparent connection. Even dialogue would sometimes be buried in these long paragraphs, giving the reader a choppy sense of organization and progression. As I settled into the book, I began to acclimate to García Márquez’s game and found myself getting used to finding profound passages embedded in seemingly unrelated text – for example, “Amaranta’s sensibility, her discreet but enveloping tenderness had been weaving an invisible web about her fiancé, which he had to push aside materially with his pale and ringless fingers in order to leave the house at eight o’clock” (107). Breathtaking passages like these felt like were difficult to identify and ruminate on because they were often sandwiched by an excess of equally intense descriptions and events.

One thing I loved in particular about the text was the absurd humor, planted dryly at unexpected moments. There are too many instances to mention, but this one in particular truly made me laugh out loud: “He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians” (71). Moments like this especially stuck out because their simple and blunt delivery stood in contrast to adjacent passages of serious intensity.

Disney’s Encanto popped into my head repeatedly in the first half of the novel. Upon further research I found that I’m definitely not the first to make this connection and many believe that One Hundred Years of Solitude may have been a significant (or entire) source of inspiration for La Familia Madrigal. Both the Buendía and Madrigal families live in massive, multi-generational mansions in the jungle of Colombia, acting as the social and political leaders of their village, and juggling surreal and magical powers. I loved thinking about this possible connection as the novel progressed; it helped to lighten some of the darker aspects of the plot.

Question for discussion: How did you make sense of time in the novel? At times it felt like the narrative crawled along at snail’s pace and then sped into overdrive skipping across decades. I could never get a sense of the children’s ages or relationships to each other. Do you think time is also subject to the magic of Macondo?

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Rulfo

Week 6: Pedro Páramo and the Company of Death

I was so excited to begin Pedro Páramo this week. I decided to amend my contract and add it as a text last minute and I’m so glad I did. I knew I was in for a treat when the librarian at Vancouver Public Library in Kits stopped me to gush over the book as I was checking out.

To be honest, by the time I sat down to start reading, I had completely forgotten about Jon’s spoiler alert in last week’s class (paraphrasing: everyone in the text is dead) and I found myself truly haunted by the unfolding of the story. Undoubtedly the most representative quality of magical realism is its nonchalance; the muted, ordinary way in which it describes the surreal and extraordinary. This is definitely my favorite part of the genre – the way it casually unsettles you. This was the feeling I had while reading the text, uncovering more and more about this “ghost” village. It felt almost haunting discovering each new dead character and the apparently thin relationship between life and death itself. 

It was both unsettling and amusing to take in. In particular, I liked this quote towards the beginning of the text, which reflects both the absurd and morbid nature of the people’s relationship to dying: “So, she got a head start on me, eh? Well, you can be sure I’ll catch up with her. No one knows better than I do how far heaven is, but I also know all the shortcuts” (23). The aloofness of Doña Eduviges’ speech almost reminded me of the cadence and timing of a horror movie monologue. There were many instances like this that inspired amusement, but could also be somewhat chilling in their content and blunt delivery.

Rulfo’s narrative power was especially evident in descriptions of intense emotion. For instance, I found myself returning to this line in particular over several days: “And inside, the woman standing in the doorway, her body impeding the arrival of day: through her arms he glimpsed pieces of sky and, beneath her feet, trickles of light. A damp light, as if the floor beneath the woman were flooded with tears” (37). This depiction is pure imagination and yet can be visualized so viscerally. It captures the deep anguish and denial felt at the beginning of grief and it’s just breathtaking to read.

The entire book read like a dream, which felt at times like a bizarre nightmare. The narration flowed seamlessly across different times, narrators, memories, and states of reality. This stream-of-consciousness style accompanied by the magical realism descriptions made the entire text feel like long, hazy dream – beautiful and transcendent but difficult to root in real time and reality. I can’t articulate here how much I enjoyed the dreamy journey Rulfo led me down and I’m excited to return to Pedro Páramo one day in the future.

Question for discussion: How did you experience the “chorus” of narrators in the book? Did you find it “loud” in a sense or confusing? Or did you enjoy the layered voices and varied perspectives offered on the town and its people?

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Borges

Week 5: Labyrinths and the Maze of Understanding

Exactly as the title foreshadows, I found myself quickly getting lost in Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths. The first definition Google provides for labyrinth is “a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” Fittingly, I found Borges’ narrative style to be at times complicated, meandering, or just misleading. I found myself needing to read sentences or passages more than once – usually several times over. And even when I felt that I was properly following the storyline, I’d come across a passage that would make me question my understanding of what came before. In this way, both frustratingly and amusingly, I felt like I was navigating a real labyrinth consuming Borges’ work. I’d like to think this was his exact intention.

Despite feeling occasionally uncertain, I really enjoyed the reading journey Labyrinths led me down. The stories were unusual and unexpected yet vivid and compelling. In each, I am positive something significant or interesting completely flew over my head. But, again, faithful to the title, I think the stories were written to provide unique paths for every reader and allow certain details to go unexamined upon your first pass. Typically in a maze, people will walk up and down the same corridors repeatedly in the process of way-finding, and in this same way, I expect multiple reads of Borges’ text to be necessary to reveal all the nuanced mysteries.

Before reading this text, I had known Borges to be associated with the genre of “magical realism,” but upon finishing, I was surprised that scientific-fiction (sci-fi) wasn’t a more affiliated style. The short stories were full of incredible invention, science, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. Certain passages were so formal and academic – almost mathematical – that I sometimes felt a rigorous background in these topics was needed to properly appreciate what was being said.

Throughout, Borges remained faithful to the themes of time, plurality, and importantly, labyrinths. In many of his stories, Borges completely deconstructs my understanding of time and introduces extraordinary layers of possibility in each narrative. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the way Rick Riordan describes the Labyrinth in the fourth novel of the Percy Jackson series; a self-aware, self-expanding maze that bends time and has a fragile relationship to reality. Similarly, Labyrinths felt like an infinitely vast, infinitely layered maze, with supernatural intelligence. There is one quote in the very first short story that I think perfectly reflects the text’s enormity: “This plan is so vast that each writer’s contribution is infinitesimal. At first it was believed that Tlön was a mere chaos, an irresponsible license of the imagination; now it is known that it is a cosmos and that the intimate laws which govern it have been formulated, at least provisionally” (8).

Question for discussion: Do you think Borges could have achieved the same maze-like reading journey in a single narrative arc rather than across multiple short stories/essays?

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