Or Alejo Carpentier… I love his short story, Viaje a la semilla. A whole life rewinds in the space of a night.
No, longer than that. The hundred years refer to the time when Melquiades wrote his manuscript and the time when the second to last Buendía deciphered. The prophecy was that a hundred years would pass before it could be understood. By the time it was written, though, about 30-50 years had already passed (if not more, damn those long lived Buendias).
Juan Rulfo, Julio Cortazar, and Isabel Allende are other writers in the realismo magico movement.
I, too, like Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold better than One Hundred Years of Solitude. But One Hundred Years is definitely very good.
I read One Hundred Years of Solitude in the original Spanish when I was 12 - it helped that Spanish was my first language. I was rather naive and sheltered, so all the parts about whores [the vulgar Spanish word for whore, which is used in the book, is “puta,” a word that would have gotten me slapped upside the head if my parents ever heard me use it] and other sexual references were quite shocking to me. Especially the part about the girl whose grandma was pimping her to 100 men per night till she paid her back for the house she accidentally burned down; also the part in which Aureliano (?) married the first Remedios, who was only about 10 and still played with dolls. That book was quite an educational material for me. I decided not to tell my folks I read it for fear of being punished, but my dad found out years later, long after I would have gotten in trouble for it, and thought it was cool that someone so young was able to appreciate it.
I’ll admit my social circle isn’t very big, and I probably read more then most of the people I know, but I’ve been mentioning the book to people and nobody has even heard of it. Granted, nobody I know has heard of Umberto Eco either until I mention In the Name of the Rose.
I have heard of Jorge Louis Borge and I’ve read the Library of Babel. I haven’t read the other story yet, though I’ll take a look at it.
Err, I hope you didn’t take this as criticism of your social circle, I’m just always amazed when things I take for granted don’t work the same way elsewhere. Like no-one in America knowing Robbie Williams, that sort of thing. Speaks more to my own tendency to over-generalize my own surroundings than anything. :o
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the hell out of it. For some reason, though, it remined me a little of a 1970’s Western called El Topo by a Chilean Director named Alejandro Jodorowsky. That film in particular had me wondering if it’s supposed to be Symbolic and for a while I went with that theory. Eventually though, I came to the conclusion that Alejandro Jodorowsky is just insane(I still like the film though).
And granted, I haven’t had much exposure to South American art, but I was vaguely wondering the same, based on a ridiculously small sample size.
I was rather naive and sheltered, so all the parts about whores [the vulgar Spanish word for whore, which is used in the book, is “puta,” a word that would have gotten me slapped upside the head if my parents ever heard me use it] and other sexual references were quite shocking to me. Especially the part about the girl whose grandma was pimping her to 100 men per night till she paid her back for the house she accidentally burned down; also the part in which Aureliano (?) married the first Remedios, who was only about 10 and still played with dolls. That book was quite an educational material for me. I decided not to tell my folks I read it for fear of being punished, but my dad found out years later, long after I would have gotten in trouble for it, and thought it was cool that someone so young was able to appreciate it.