30 covers for #WITMONTH An Italian reborn

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My last cover for this series of post is an example of a writer being rediscovered and this is one in recent years has seem a revivial and that is the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg.THis is a collection of short essays by the late Italian writer that has seen a number of her books reissued in the last few years. I reviewed this book here.

One hundred year of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One hundred years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Columbian fiction

Original title – Cien años de soledad

Translator – Gregory Rabassa

Source – Personal copy

I said this was this year read-along for Spanish lit month. I got out my copy which isn’t the one I read but a later edition I read it from the library as I did most of my books in my late teens the little Library in Alnwick was a great gem. I am not much of a rereader but I decided to go back and cover this as it has been five years since Marquez passed he is still the giant of the Latin American boom. I dod wonder if I would find it as engrossing as I did when I read it all those years ago sometimes my not wanting to reread is a wanting to avoid the disappointment of a book seeming less on second reading.

MAny years later, as he faced the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendia was to rememeber that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe house, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormus, like prehistoric eggs.The world was so recent that many things lacked names and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point

The stunning opening of the book as some one on twitter sad maybe the best !!

I then set off to the strange village of Macondo and to the founding family of that Village the Buendia family. The village is an island or is it that is the point of the book it is a family history but a lot of the book you see each generation as similar or as a pale copy of the previous in a way the use of similar names in fact in most generations the same name Aureliano is a name a family name that crops up in the second generation after Jose Arcadio Buendia the founder of the village, in fact, the opening lines is his son and the closing lines is another Aureliano in a more modern Macondo. The village seems to want to avoid moving forward the solitude of the title is the village it ways each generation is a subject to some family intermarrying first cousins etc. Each generation also has a beautiful and alluring female Remedios, Santa Sofia, Remedios the beauty (another recurring name !). A band of visiting gypsies that bring the great inventions of the day and whose lead dies but comes back to the village.pilar that lived for 140 odd years after sleeping with some brothers. These all add to the mystic and strange feeling of the whole place being caught in a revolving door of time.

During a pause in the caresses. Jose  Arcadio stretched out naked on the bed without knowing what to do while the girl inspire him. A gypsy woman with splendid flesh came in a short time after accompanied by a  man who was not of the caracan but who was not from the village either, and the began to undress in front of the bed. Without meaning to, the woman looked at Jose Acradio and examined his magnificent animal in respose with a kind of pathetic fervour

The women in Marquez’s book always seem similar as thou remembered from his own past

So was it worth rereading well yes I loved it like I did the first time I know some people get lost with the names and generations but I let flow over me like a river and just drift with Marquez prose for me, the book is full of him as a writer? I have cover five of his book before on the blog. The pace Macondo is a veiled version of his home town of Acacataca part of the history mirror-like the arrival of the fruit company something that happened itself in the village. A beautiful woman well this is maybe where he will fall down at some point in the future as Marquez loved to describe beautiful women in his books I often feel he is describing the same group of young women from his teen years over and over again. Then there is the revolving sense of the village and this is something that seems more distant now than it did when I first read the book I remember visiting the distant village in Northumberland and the people I picked up for the elderly  day centre known the history of these places back for years and generations like the Buendia family also the way he misses giving technology encroaching on Macondo something that has been lost as the internet and everything it brings has steamrollered that world. It is fair to say yes this book was as good in fact in a way it has changed how I viewed it in the twenty-plus year since my first reading Marquez was a master of what he did