In keeping with the intention of doing something with the ways I'm allocating my time, here's a review of the book I just finished, Collected Novellas, which contains three Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novellas:
- Leaf Storm -- This opens the collection and is, I believe, Marquez's first novella. It rotates between four points of view, a grandfather, a mother, a son, and some sort of disconnected floating perspective. It skips back and forth through time and it focuses tightly on details which seem unrelated while glossing over details which might answer questions I, as a reader, had. In short, it was very annoying for me to try to read it as a story. Once I gave that up and just read it for the words, it's quite pretty. It's like a poem which is communicating most through negative space, the words not said in it. That's actually my favorite form for a poem to take and this novella has that feel to it.
- No One Writes to the Colonel -- This is a sad story about sad old people who live in a sad village and are raising a rooster. The Colonel of the story reminded me a lot of my maternal grandfather in temperament. He's stubborn and dignified and persists in the face of danger to himself and his loved ones. The village the story is set in reminds me a lot of my hometown, if it were located in South America and subject to violent political upheaval. This story made more sense to me than the first one, but it was still quite a downer. There's a lot of hard luck scrabble going on here and that was an unpleasant reminder of my childhood. But the prose is quite nice and so this story is a good read for people who like words for the sake of words.
- Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- This was the work I checked this book out of the library for the purpose of reading on the recommendation of Vylar. All in all, this was my favorite story in this work. It's about a guy who's killed, obviously enough. The story is the efforts of the narrator to reconstruct the events surrounding the death of the protagonist, with a sort of he-said she-said and distorted through years of memory effect to the efforts. At this point, an informed critic would probably compare this story in some way to Rashomon. Unfortunately, I've never seen it or read the works it's taken from, so you'll have to fill in your own comparison here. There's a lot of good description in this novella and some quick, concise characterizations, capturing a multitude of attitudes and behaviors in short passages. It's also got a rather nice little love story inside, with a touch I really liked [the thousands of letters, carefully organized ... but all unopened] but which is a tangent from the narrative though arguably the point of the story. It's got a few gory bits but well worth the read. No one really seems to come off in a good light, here, and there's culpability aplenty to be handed out for the murder which is the cornerstone of this story.
Translators on this one were Gregory Rabassa and J.S. Bernstein. Yes, it's true. I'm woefully monolingual, though it's distinctly possible I could have tackled a Spanish version of this, with dictionary at hand. It's been a decade since anyone expected me to speak the language of another country. Any polyglot tendencies have been along the course of programming languages in the interim. There's no foreword or afterword from the translators so it's not easy for me to discern what elements are their voice and what is Marquez's original intent. There do certainly seem to be typesetting issues with at least the first novella, where a point of view switches mid-passage when other such switches have been presaged by typographical devices.
I guess this is representative of the genre of magical realism, a phrase I'd always associated with Tim Powers, quite wrongly. To me, magical realism meant a sense of the orderly fantastical, a magic with a logic beneath it, perhaps not known but certainly practicable. Do A, B, C, expect D, not from understanding the process, but simply from trial and error evidence of consequence. I gather genuine magical realism is more like telling a fantasy story and disguising it as modern prose, so that the outlandish elements don't jar with the real world setting of the work. That's okay, too. But I think I still prefer whatever Tim Powers might be writing in to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in general. I guess I like to know when someone's pulling my leg.
posted at 21:26 PDT (-0700) (comments disabled) permanent link
