One Hundred Years of Solitude
It's always disappointing to dive into a classic, beloved book and discover that it is just not meant for you. I really wanted to like this book. I enjoy magical realism as a genre, and I remember liking what I read of Marquez in AP Spanish in high school. But this book was such a slog that I gave up after about 150 pages.
There were a couple of cool things. At one point the entire town is struck by insomnia and slowly begins losing their memories. I enjoyed reading about that, but I wish it had gone on longer. Because the book covers seven generations (100 years), no one episode gets more than a few pages. Anything that was interesting was quickly over and I was left with characters that I didn't care much about.
The characters were the biggest problem I had with this book. They were constantly getting in their own way. Creating misery for themselves like they were all suffering from the same stupid martyr complex. One woman falls deeply in love with a man. He eventually falls in love with her, too. And they court and are happy, in that deep, content way that's the stuff of lasting relationships. But when he proposes she refuses him for no discernible reason and they both fall into deep depressions because she's just too damn stubborn to actually marry this man she claims to love so much. It's not fun to read about.
And that's not even touching the shocking amount of rape and incest in this book. One man tries to rape his own mother in what is one of the most uncomfortable scenes I've ever read. And she could probably have stopped him by just telling him she's his mother, but the truth is just too difficult a concept for any of these characters to grasp.
So I gave up. There's no point in sticking with a book that just pisses me off.
There were a couple of cool things. At one point the entire town is struck by insomnia and slowly begins losing their memories. I enjoyed reading about that, but I wish it had gone on longer. Because the book covers seven generations (100 years), no one episode gets more than a few pages. Anything that was interesting was quickly over and I was left with characters that I didn't care much about.
The characters were the biggest problem I had with this book. They were constantly getting in their own way. Creating misery for themselves like they were all suffering from the same stupid martyr complex. One woman falls deeply in love with a man. He eventually falls in love with her, too. And they court and are happy, in that deep, content way that's the stuff of lasting relationships. But when he proposes she refuses him for no discernible reason and they both fall into deep depressions because she's just too damn stubborn to actually marry this man she claims to love so much. It's not fun to read about.
And that's not even touching the shocking amount of rape and incest in this book. One man tries to rape his own mother in what is one of the most uncomfortable scenes I've ever read. And she could probably have stopped him by just telling him she's his mother, but the truth is just too difficult a concept for any of these characters to grasp.
So I gave up. There's no point in sticking with a book that just pisses me off.
Comments
Post a Comment