Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I read his One Hundred Years of Solitude just because I liked his name – Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

If you think that’s ludicrous, you must read this work. It borders on the ludicrous and the real. Garcia Marquez is a character in the book too.

Readers either love his work or loathe it.

Some read this book over and over again to find multiple meanings as the magic realism technique and the repetition of names and hereditary traits in the characters offer them mind games to play.

And on the other hand, there are readers who cannot read this book beyond a few pages – they either feel drowsy or get too confused with the plot that tends to go backwards and forwards simultaneously. These readers believe that like abstract art, this novel has been made famous by university professors who have not understood it themselves, who find it thrilling to offer it on literature courses just to see students struggle with the meaning.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez died last Good Friday. Interestingly, a character, Ursula, in this Nobel prize-winning book, dies on a Good Friday. Ursula lives for more than a hundred years and watches over her eccentric family and keeps it from going to ruins or from the ghosts of the past that haunt all the family members.

One has to be slightly mad to enjoy this book.
To a certain extent, we all are, aren’t we?



(Picture courtesy: Google Images)