Mar
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Marquez: post 7
Posted by: | March 2, 2010 | Comments Off on Marquez: post 7
First off, I must say Cien años de soledad begins as a very challenging read. The book has a very poetic flow, therefore while reading I kept debating whether to look words up in the dictionary or to skim over unfamiliar words to not disrupt the flow.
As with the other books, there is a very fluid sense of time as the book jumps back and forth between the present and the past. This weaving back and forth, makes the novel a very complex book, and at times seems hard to follow. Garcia Marquez’s blending of time is similar to Asturias’, giving Cien años de soledad a mythical element to the story. The story almost seems surreal or dreamlike as it it difficult to pin point what is a memory, history, or the present. But unlike the other books, this novel even projects into the future, because from the first sentence we discover that Colonel Aureliano Buendía will be executed. Another similarity Cien años de soledad shares with the other texts is the importance of history. The book begins with the family tree and in the book highlight the importance of ancestors and family lineage. For example chapter two explain that Úrsula and José Arcadio Buendía were afraid to get married and have children because they are distant cousins showing the importance of family history and hw it affects the present. Both Asturias and Carpentier stress the importance of history and the effects of history in their novels.
The example I mentioned above also highlights one of the first clear example of magic realism in the novel. Úrsula and José have good reason to be worried because in the past two of their relatives gave birth to a child with a pigtails, therefore an obvious example of magic realism.
I am glad to be reading Cien años de soledad because I have honestly read the first page several times in different classes. I think it is very interesting the importance of the sentence, “ el mundo era tan reciente, que muchas cosas carecían de nombres y para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo” (p. 83) because I remember that this sentence can make connections with the bible as Adam is responsible for naming animals in the bible. Even from the first part of the book, it is noticeable that learning and gaining knowledge is am important part of the book. I feel like Cien años de soledad is filled with important details similar to this, and I hope that we have time to analyze some of them in depth.
