Since I already addressed the whole book in my first blog post instead of splitting it up into two halves, I’m going to take a different approach this week: comparing Márquez’s style and themes against Borges’s. Whether it’s justified or not, the two often get paired together as the two great authors of Latin America and I certainly went into this book expecting something comparable to the otherworldly sensation of reading Borges. While they are obviously wildly different in countless ways, this expectation was satisfied even better than if the novel were truly Borgesian: it presents a picture of the world as original as Borges’s, yet so different that it’s almost as shocking as reading Borges for the first time was. Plus, I always find it interesting to compare my favourite books to each other in an attempt to extract which shared themes appeal to me.

One of the first differences I noticed between Borges and Márquez was their opposing authorial voices: Borges usually writes from a first-person perspective and includes the narrator in his stories, while Márquez is detached and absent from his subject matter. As the interview with Gerald Martin indicates, however, this technique of Márquez was a trick; though he takes the position of a distant observer, he is truly writing about his own life and memories as alienated from himself, comparable to the situation Borges explores in “Borges and I.” Relating to this, Borges has a tendency to spell out the possible implications of his stories, at times reading like a critic of his own work. Márquez, in contrast, leaves the wider themes of One Hundred Years of Solitude largely unspoken, or at most only vaguely hinted at; even later in life, he refused to elaborate on his intentions with this book. Despite Borges’s reputation as enigmatic and impenetrable, Márquez almost comes across as the more mysterious figure in this contrast.

In my post on Borges, I described his works as an attempt to illustrate infinity. Perhaps infinity isn’t the scope of Marquez – a hundred years isn’t all that long in the grand scheme of things – yet this book gave me a similar feeling a vastness. While Borges manages to condense theoretical conceptions of infinity into stories no more than a couple pages long, Márquez paints a concrete world teeming with intersecting threads full of more detail than anything Borges ever wrote. The endless variation of minute differences that Borges imagines in “The Library of Babel” is realized in a story in which it’s practically impossible to keep track of everything at once, even while everything always seems to repeat. It’s only in the final chapter that this history is totalized, condensed into a moment through Melquiades’s manuscript. In the lecture video, this was compared to climactic scene in Borges’s “The Aleph,” a connection I also noticed. “The Immortal” (also not included in Ficciones) occurred to me as well as another story of a people as lost in time and doomed to repetition as the Buendias.

Did others notice further similarities and differences between Márquez and Borges? Or do you think comparing the two is even justified or worthwhile?