One Hundred Years of Solitude and a little bit of Gone With The Wind

I finished One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Friday. I must say, I did enjoy the book, but I do not believe that it is my favorite of his novels. I enjoyed The General in His Labriynth more, maybe because it was my first Garcia Marquez book, or that I enjoyed the plot more, but still this book was good. It was definitely a challenge to keep up with all of the Jose Aurelio's and the Segundo's and whose child was whose. One of the more "weirder" I guess you could say or the more less acceptable behavior was the odd relationships between the aunts and the children. For example, towards the end of the book, you have the young Aureliano Babiliona falling in love with his aunt Amaranta Ursula and basically forces himself upon her while her husband Gaston is in the other room and she let's him! This type of behavior is quite rampant and I was aghast at the behavior! I kid, but I am pretty sure my eyes were wide open at some passages of the book!

I loved the magical realism in Marquez's novels, to me they add a dash of romanticism to his novels interwined with the magical events. When Remedios the Beauty flies off into the heavens, I wasn't sad, but loved that she did sort of fly off into the heavens, as if she was always meant to. One of my favorite characters was the patriarch of the family, Jose Arcadio Buendia. He was ridiculed by his friends and family a like, was enchanted by the "magic" of the gypsies and was always trying to conquer alchemy. I was sad when they tied him to the tree and there he was for so many years talking to ghosts of the past.

Overall, I felt a sense of sadness within the book, that the family was all around cursed, and the men for whatever reason kept going to Pilar Tener! The family itself created their own demise, by the decisions and actions they chose and it was sad. You wanted them to prosper and succeed and when it seemed like they were going to, like those red ants which seem to me represented destruction and the fate they could not overcome, those rainy days kept coming until they were all ultimately wiped out. I recommend that everyone should read this, it definitely is a sad but good read.

Right now I have begun Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell, the novel of the south. While the book itself is a breezy enjoyable read, I can't help but not believe that these Georgia plantations owners were just so kind to their slaves. It is as if Mitchell is romanticising these southern slaveowners. While I am sure there were kind slaveowners who didn't whip their slaves, I am going to go out on a limb here and say that not everyone was like that. Mitchell ignores a lot of the truths and chooses to idealize the actions of the soliders of the Confederacy. I am only 300 pages in and there is a lot more novel to go, but we shall see what else Mitchell chooses to ignore/romanticise. Maybe it's because I am a damn yankee but you can't blatanly ignore truth and facts and create wonderful fiction.

Until next time!