One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Wikipedia:  This is a landmark 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founds the town of Macondo, a fictitious town in the country of Colombia.

The magical realist style and thematic substance of One Hundred Years of Solitude established it as an important representative novel of the literary Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, which was stylistically influenced by Modernism (European and North American) and the Cuban Vanguardia (Avant-Garde) literary movement.

Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 37 languages and has sold more than 30 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez's magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works in the Spanish literary canon.

As a metaphoric, critical interpretation of Colombian history, from foundation to contemporary nation, One Hundred Years of Solitude presents different national myths through the story of the Buendía family, whose spirit of adventure places them amidst the important actions of Colombian historical events. 

The basic structure of the novel traces the chronicle of the Buendía family over a century. It is the history of a family with inescapable repetitions, confusions, and progressive decline. Beginning sometime in the early nineteenth century, the novel's time span covers the family's rise and fall from the foundation of Macondo by the youthful patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, until the death of the last member of the line. Throughout the narrative, the fates of the Buendías and Macondo are parallel reflections. In fact, we witness the history of a people who, like the wandering tribes of Israel, are best understood in terms of their genesis from a single family.

What did I think:

I started this novel twice with an interval between.  I felt I had not given the novel my full attention the first time and went back again resolving to give more focus to the narrative and try and wrap my head round the characters.  But this was such a problem, with the repetition of names as the narrative unfolded.  But not just the repetition of one character's name, but the successive naming of subsequent generations using the small pool of names for the characters.  I mean, 17 Aurelianos and 7 generations of Buendias!!  There were times when I felt as if I was reading the Bible.  It's a family saga without equal!

I resorted to Wikipedia and thought, well if I read this I will at least have learnt something about the plot, the symbolism and metaphors, the context, the significance in Latin American literature, the reasons for the acclaim it received.  And, what magical realism is.  Well, to be truthful if I never read another magical realistic novel again I will be happy!  My reading temperament is not cut out for the blurring of fantasy and the real world.   It's a style of writing in which the supernatural is presented as mundane, and the mundane as supernatural or extraordinary,  a constant intertwining of the ordinary with the extraordinary. 

I was interested to read what the Solitude of the title represented and I read that:

"Perhaps the most dominant theme in the book is that of solitude. Macondo was founded in the remote jungles of the Colombian rainforest. The solitude of the town is representative of the colonial period in Latin American history, where outposts and colonies were, for all intents and purposes, not interconnected.  Isolated from the rest of the world, the Buendías grow to be increasingly solitary and selfish. With every member of the family living only for him- or her-self, the Buendías become representative of the aristocratic, land-owning elite who came to dominate Latin America in keeping with the sense of Latin American history symbolized in the novel."

In addition to Wikipedia I read other critiques and sets of study notes ion the Internet in order to try and get inside the framework and purpose of the novel, but in truth even these bits of text had my head spinning.  But of all the comment and criticism I read about 100 Years this particularly struck a chord with me:

"Although One Hundred Years of Solitude has come to be considered one of, if not the, most influential Latin American texts of all time, the novel and Gabriel García Márquez have both received occasional criticisms. Stylistically, Harold Bloom (Harold Bloom (born July 11, 1930) is an American literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University and has written 40 books including 20 on literary criticism - so he knows a thing or two) remarked that "My primary impression, in the act of rereading One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a kind of aesthetic battle fatigue, since every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb... There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it."  

That was the problem, the intensity of concentration the book seemed to require almost reduced me to tears of frustration.

But at least I know a bit more about this important and iconic novel than I did before and, in a way, I'm glad it was chosen!

The Temporary Gentleman

The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry

Oh, Mr Barry, you can do no wrong!

I have read most of Barry's novels as the story of the Dunnes and the McNultys unfolds.  He singles out various members of  the family and documents chapters in their lives, the series being a patchwork of narratives about the lives of the various family members.  After reading Days Without End I checked the Wiki entry on Barry and found that there were two titles that I had not read, and The Temporary Gentleman is one such.

As usual you can count on getting a good review from the Guardian:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/mar/29/temporary-gentleman-review-sebastian-barry-novel

Here is a review from an Amazon customer, modified where my opinion differed and which wasn't by very much, which nevertheless pretty much sums up how I felt about the book:

Sebastian Barry, as often he does, brings a lyrical sadness to this tale. I was knocked out by the opening sequence, it had something of the impact that the opening chapter of Enduring Love had.  The events described in that chapter constitute a forerunner to a number of nearly fatal disasters that befall Jack McNulty. But the main theme, the slow deterioration of a marriage and Jack's inability to face the degree to which he is destroying Mai, in spite of his constant protestations of love, is written in Barry's entirely engaging style. It is the voice of the story teller, the weaver of yarns. I love that style when his text flows over the page in one paragraph, seemingly seamlessly; if there is punctuation you do not notice it, and his powers of description, the words he finds are so far beyond the commonplace.  I picked up this book after I dropped my current read in the bath, just long enough to require a dry on the Aga and an iron, so not wishing to be without a bedtime comforter I chose that close to hand.  I read The Temporary Gentleman through two or three days, wanting to turn the pages....... and not really wanting to resume afterwards Knowledge of Angels which, being a 'set book', must be finished.   There are a number of sub-themes running through Barry's novel. One of these is the nature and impact of colonialism on both the colonised, and the coloniser. All of that is handled very well. The reader also meets Roseanne whose story will be told in Secret Scripture. Barry is a first class craftsman, ans this work confirms once more that he is a writer of real seriousness, but with that a master of story making.

To recap, here is a list of Barry's series:

The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998)

Annie Dunne (2002)

A Long Long Way (2005)

The Secret Scripture (2008)

On Canaan's Side (2011)

The Temporary Gentleman (2014)

Days Without End (2016)

When God was a Rabbit

When God was a Rabbit by Sarah Winman

1968. The year Paris takes to the streets. The year Martin Luther King loses his life for a dream. The year Eleanor Maud Portman is born.

Young Elly's world is shaped by those who inhabit it: her loving but maddeningly distractible parents; a best friend who smells of chips and knows exotic words like 'slag'; an ageing fop who tapdances his way into her home, a Shirley Bassey impersonator who trails close behind; lastly, of course, a rabbit called God. In a childhood peppered with moments both ordinary and extraordinary, Elly's one constant is her brother Joe.

Twenty years on, Elly and Joe are fully grown and as close as they ever were. Until, that is, one bright morning when a single, earth-shattering event threatens to destroy their bond forever.
Spanning four decades and moving between suburban Essex, the wild coast of Cornwall and the streets of New York, this is a story about childhood, eccentricity, the darker side of love and sex, the pull and power of family ties, loss and life. More than anything, it's a story about love in all its forms.

What Sarah Winman writes about her own book:

Elly is the kind of girl who grows up too fast. She doesn’t like to play with little girls her age; she prefers the company of Mr. Golan, her elderly neighbour. But her friendship with Mr. Golan takes a dark turn, and only Elly’s brother, Joe, knows her secret. Joe gives Elly a pet rabbit, which she names god, to alleviate the loneliness of her childhood. Elly soon finds another best friend: Jenny Penny, a new girl in town who has a chaotic home life. But Elly and Jenny are soon separated, too --- Elly’s parents decide to open a bed-and-breakfast in Cornwall, and Jenny disappears without a trace. Friendless in her new town, Elly leans on her family for support, especially Joe, who is struggling to come to terms with his sexuality.

Even as an adult, shadows from childhood haunt Elly’s life. She learns that Jenny Penny murdered an abusive husband, and they renew their friendship through letters Jenny writes from jail. Elly finds her calling as a newspaper columnist, writing about the relationships she has lost and found. Joe tries to start a new life in New York, but he disappears in the chaos of 9/11. Elly manages to track Joe down, but he has lost his memory and feels stifled by his sister’s devotion. As Joe’s memory gradually returns, he reveals Elly’s childhood secret: Mr. Golan molested her. Elly’s loved ones can finally help her heal, and she learns to rely on the family and friends who have stood by her during her years of silence.

What did I think:

This book has so much of real life crammed into it: childhood friendships, child molestation, abuse of women, a lawyer's guilt at betraying a victim by his clever defense of the guilty perpetrayor, homosexual love, attachment to pet animals, terminal illness, hostage taking and ransom, life-shattering events on a grander scale, mystic stuff which defies rational explanation, marital contradictions and idiosyncracies.  That is a long list but never did I have the sense that the writer was trying to pack in as much drama as she could.  Because sometimes writers can over egg their pudding and lose the attention and credulity of the reader.  It was a highly plausible narrative of love and loss, I turned the pages feeling absolutely engaged with the characters.  I thought her narrative around the 9/11 event was well done, not over-dramatized and the lost and found story around Joe was well judged.  I thought the events around Arthur and the errant coconut was a nice touch, what was bad had been turned around.  Joe had been lost and found.  Arthur's sight had been lost and found.  And I thought her ending was masterly because really we have no idea where Elly and Jenny Penny will go from there.............  I loved it.

American Writers on topics of family conflict, human morality, integrity

American Literature   

The Surface of Earth by Reynolds Price

Published in 1975, The Surface of Earth is the monumental narrative that charts the slow, inextricable twining of the Mayfield and Kendal families. Set in the plain of North Carolina and the coast and hills of Virginia from 1903 to 1944, it chronicles the marriage of Forrest Mayfield and Eva Kendal, the hard birth of their son, Eva's return to her father after her mother's death, and the lives of two succeeding generations.

The Surface of Earth is the work of one of America's supreme masters of fiction, a journey across time and the poignantly evoked America of the first half of our century that explores the mysterious topography of the powers of love, home, and identity. In his evocation of the hungers, defeats, and rewards of individuals in moments of dark solitude and radiant union, Price has created an enduring literary testament to the range of human life.

This was a dense reading experience for me.  The voice and the plotting were authentically American.

A lengthy review has been written by Richard Gilman for the New York Times

Stoner by JohnWilliams

William Stoner enters the University of Missouri at nineteen to study agriculture.

A seminar on English literature changes his life, and he never returns to work on his father's farm. Stoner becomes a teacher. He marries the wrong woman. His life is quiet, and after his death his colleagues remember him rarely. Yet with truthfulness, compassion and intense power, this novel uncovers a story of universal value. Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life. A reading experience like no other, itself a paean to the power of literature, it is a novel to be savoured.

Both these novels were recommended by an American friend who is an academic man, a keen reader.  Neither, I think, would have come to my attention without that signpost.  Thanks Ty.

Days without End and Confederates

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry

I've just started a Reading Forum using the Slack chatroom programme.  We are five readers, I am the common factor, the others are friends of mine, geographically spread but women who, I think, would find each other interesting to know.  So I sent them an email proposing my idea and waited to see what the response would be.  The response was favourable, our reading group is established.  Here is what I wrote in that first email:

"I am prompted to write because I have just finished Days without End by Sebastian Barry.  His latest novel has been longlisted for the Man Booker (I follow the Man Booker prize).  Some of you may know that I set myself the task of reading the whole sequence of Short-listeds and Winners.  I have read all Barry's other books which follow the history of two Irish families.  All Dunne/McNulty novels have been prize-winners, two were Booker short-listed.

....... A “searing, magnificent” depiction of a gay relationship during the bloody founding of modern America, described by judges as “one of the most wonderful depictions of love in the whole of fiction”, has won the Costa book of the year award.........  Read more here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/31/days-without-end-wins-sebastian-barry-second-costa-book-of-the-year#img-1

Opening para from the Guardian review of Days without End:

Sebastian Barry's commitment to telling the stories of two Irish families, the Dunnes and the McNultys, over several novels and multiple time frames and locations, has led to one of the most compelling, bravura and heart-wrenching fictional projects of recent memory. Its gaps and fissures, its silences, its elaboration of attachment, separation and loss amount to a profound meditation on the nature of national identity, enforced emigration and the dispersal of a people into lands frequently inhospitable and alienating, there to forge a new life.

I leave this 'serving suggestion' there.  So what else have I read recently?"

I 'read' this book thanks to Audible. Sebastian Barry has alluring Irish good looks, and the voice of the narrator, Aidan Kelly, had a wonderful sense of authenticy.  Kelly is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and a Dublin/London-based actor with extensive stage, film, television, and radio experience. He has appeared as Tom in the Druid Theatre’s production of The Good Father, directed by Garry Hynes for the Galway Arts Festival. He won the Sunday Tribune Award for his performances in Howie the Rookie and Comedians.

Confederates by Thomas Keneally  Man Booker Prize: shortlisted 1979

Confederates is a novel by the Australian author Thomas Keneally which uses the American Civil War as its main subject matter.

As the Civil War tears America apart, General Stonewall Jackson leads a troop of Confederate soldiers on a long trek towards the battle they believe will be a conclusive victory. Through their hopes, fears and losses, Keneally searingly conveys both the drama and mundane hardship of war, and brings to life one of the most emotive episodes in American history.

Confederates uses the American Civil War as a setting for a more personal conflict between neighbours. In the midst of the war's climactic battle  another conflict is underway. Ephie Bumpass' husband Usaph and Ephie's lover Decatur Cate are thrown together to fight in the Shenandoah Volunteers. Cate's emasculating injury in the battle is a symbolic punishment for his sin.


My comment:  I got half way through this book before I was obliged to set it aside because I had another title to read within a timeframe.   

Fish have no Feet

Fish Have No Feet

Longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017.
Keflavik: a town that has been called the darkest place in Iceland, surrounded by black lava fields, hemmed in by a sea that may not be fished. Its livelihood depends entirely on a U.S. military base, a conduit for American influences that shaped Icelandic culture and ethics from the 1950s to the dawn of the new millennium.

It is to Keflavik that Ari – a writer and publisher – returns from Copenhagen at the behest of his dying father, two years after walking out on his wife and children. He is beset by memories of his youth, spent or misspent listening to Pink Floyd and the Beatles, fraternising with American servicemen – who are regarded by the locals with a mixture of admiration and contempt – and discovering girls. There is one girl in particular he could never forget - her fate has stayed with him all his life.

Layered through Ari's story is that of his grandparents in a village on the eastern coast, a world away from modern Keflavik. For his grandfather Oddur, life at sea was a destiny; for Margrét its elemental power brings only loneliness and fear.

Both the story of a singular family and an epic that sparkles with love, pain and lifelong desire with all of human life.   Fish have no Feet is a novel of profound beauty and wisdom by a major international writer.

By the author of the acclaimed trilogy, Heaven and Hell, The Sorrow of Angels and The Heart of Man; you can read a review of Fish have no Feet from the Irish Times:

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/fish-have-no-feet-by-j%C3%B3n-kalman-stef%C3%A1nsson-translated-by-philip-roughton-1.2813844

Maya's Notebook

Maya's Notebook by Isabel Allende

In a nutshell this novel, encompasses a crime story, an addiction-recovery narrative, and a family drama..

Abandoned by her parents as a baby, Maya has been brought up by her tough grandmother Nini and her gentle grandfather Popo. But at school, the teenage Maya finds herself drawn towards the wrong crowd. Before she knows what’s happened, Maya’s life has turned into one of drug addiction and crime.  Things go from bad to worse as Maya disappears into the criminal underworld. To save her from her old associates, Nini sends Maya to a remote island off the coast of Chile.  Safe amongst her new neighbours, Maya feels compelled to write her story and slowly she begins to heal. But can she learn to live with her scars, and will her past ever catch up with her?

Character portraits and sketches of other lives abound, although Maya is the main focus "with hair dyed four primary colours and a nose ring".  In the opening pages we find Maya on a remote island in the Chiloe region of Chile, on the run from "the FBI, Interpol and a Las Vegas criminal gang."  .

                          

Fortunately, she has a loving grandmother who has arranged this sanctuary, and despite recent ordeals, her confident, upbeat nature soon charms the locals. She is smart and curious, and the novel brims with her discoveries about the archipelago and its people: tourist fantasies and harsher realities are described with great feeling. On the island Maya begins to write down her story, from her grandmother's flight from Chile in the early days of the Pinochet regime to her own childhood in Berkeley, teenage loss and three years of plummeting crisis. At the same time, the Chilotan narrative moves forward, and Maya gets involved in village life, forms close bonds, and begins to uncover horrors from the past.

Maya is the lightest of narrative guises: wise beyond her 19 years but convincingly coltish, she gives us an outsider's observations ("happiness seems kitsch to Chileans") and has a chirpy, wry sense of humour; when she falls in love, she writes her adoration and despair with hyperbole, exclamation marks and teenage wholeheartedness. The sections describing her own past are dominated by the energetic narrative impetus and lose track of any feelings of abandonment, terror and hurt at the story's centre. This may be due to the pressure applied by the crime plot, or the need to drive this book in the direction it is headed – towards a story of survival.

Maya used to read the dictionary with her beloved grandfather, something we're reminded of when she drops words such as "lapidary" and "telluric". Harder to reconcile are the almost anthropological observations, such as this, of her teenage gang: "We walked along dragging our feet, with our cells, headphones, backpacks, chewing gum, ripped jeans, and coded language." Little of that coded language finds its way into the book, even during intense scenarios with her best friends and sometime boyfriend, a hapless fellow in low-slung baggy jeans. The slang is mild: "dumbass", "man". The crime boss she works with in Vegas explains, "Heroin doesn't kill: it's the addicts' lifestyles that do…" The effect is a bit like taking a bus tour through the desperate parts of Las Vegas, a guide delivering facts about life on the streets. You see a mugging through the window, but the bus has moved on.

The prioritising of story over voice suggests that it's not the aim of Maya's Notebook to plunge the reader into the grim existence of a real-life Maya; this is a tale of revelations and resolutions, and the plot is more answerable to its own turns than to the brutal possibilities of reality. Despite the observations about the number of young people lost to street violence, crime and slavery, or because of them, the driving force of this novel is ultimately resilience – the power of love and acceptance to face down terrible things.

In this worldview, perhaps, the wise perspective of the narrative voice can elide with the young narrator: "I'm not going to be weighed down [by past mistakes] till the day I die," Maya insists. Her argument is compelling. She hits some nasty snags on the way to her rock bottom, but emerges (after a rather idyllic sounding rehab) with her joy in life intact, able to heal others. Whether a consequence of characterisation, magical thinking or authorial determination, this girl and her community are going to be all right. "The whole world is magical," says Manuel, the man who has survived much and becomes Maya's protector, and the book is best read in that spirit.

Secretum discubitus

The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey

Catherine Bailey read history at Oxford University and is a successful, award-winning television producer and director, making a range of critically acclaimed documentary films inspired by her interest in twentieth century history. She lives in West London.  She has written a compelling account of a dysfunctional family in the upper echelons of nobility.  The account reads like mystery and her research for the book, which flows like a novel, must have required superior detective skills.

...........At 6 am on 21st April 1940 John the 9th Duke of Rutland, and one of Britain's wealthiest men, ended his days, virtually alone, lying on a makeshift bed in a dank cramped suite of rooms in the servants' quarters of his own home, Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire.  For weeks, as his health deteriorated, his family, his servants - even the King's doctor - pleaded with him to come out, but he refused.

After his death, his son and heir, Charles, the 10th Duke of Rutland, ordered that the rooms be locked up and they remained untouched for sixty years.  But what lay behind this extraordinary set of circumstances?

For the first time, in The Secret Rooms, Catherine Bailey unravels a complex and compelling tale of love, honour and betrayal, played out in the grand salons of Britain's stately homes at the turn of the twentieth century, and on the battlefields of the Western Front. At its core is a secret so dark that it consumed the life of the man who fought to his death to keep it hidden. This extraordinary mystery from the author of Black Diamonds, is perfect for lovers of Downton Abbey, Brideshead Revisited and The Suspicions of Mr Whicher.

.............. as I read the final pages I could only marvel at what I had read and what it tells the reader about the lengths to which members of a family will go to protect 'the firm', to connive, to deceive, to bring the privileges which birth has conferred on an individual to bear for personal advancement and preference.  Violet, the female protagonist in the story, is a scheming woman of the worst kind.  What she represents is the lengths to which mothers will go to protect their own.