Why doesn't /lit/ talk about this masterpiece?

it's the top 100

You don't need to read literature in Spanish to appear 'well-read' or 'cultured'. You don't need to pretend that Latin American literature deserves respect and its own space. Cherish the classics and the Anglo-Saxon hallmarks of good literature.

>>24576686
Nice projection. It wipes the floor with most Anglo novels, especially since 1950 and even 1900

>>24576686
Pfft, dumbfuck. Back to /pol/, my nigga.

It's overrated and I am a native spanish speaker.

>>24576583 (OP)
/lit/ reads the same three or four books
>>24576686
This is a classic novel.

>>24576583 (OP)
It’s not even close to being a masterpiece. I won’t call it mediocre, but among the works which usually are referred to as great, this has to be the bottom of the barrel.

I give so little of a fuck about south america that every word I read of this book bore me to my soul. Despite my best attempts, I could never get far. What I read from it wasn't interesting anyway so I don't think I'm missing much

>>24576801
I don't give a shit about south america either but I liked the book. I don't think it's necessary to "care" about that place. The book has one of the best endings in all of literature in my opinion.

>>24576783
>It's overrated
Borges is more overrated tb h

>>24576813
The book is full of references to latinamerican historical and social events.
You don't need to care about these to enjoy the book but they will make you appreaciate it even more.

>>24576818
Oh yeah, Borges is some wankery.

>>24576583 (OP)
Borges never wrote a formal review of Cien años de soledad, but in half-a-dozen interviews—especially the conversations with Fernando Sorrentino (Buenos Aires, 1973), with Antonio Carrizo on Radio Municipal (1977) and with Osvaldo Ferrari (1984)—the topic came up and he always reacted in the same laconic, slightly bemused way. He said he had had the novel read aloud to him soon after its appearance, managed “un par de tardes” before asking the reader to stop, and decided that the luxuriant, Faulkner-tinged profusion of characters and episodes was “not for me.” He conceded that García Márquez possessed “gran imaginación” and that the first pages were “muy poderosas,” but he added that the tale very quickly dissolved, for his taste, into “una selva de hipérboles” and “un repertorio de trucos barrocos.” He called the book “demasiado largo y quizá demasiado fácil de prolongar indefinidamente,” quipped that after the third or fourth Aureliano he no longer knew who was who, and summed up by saying: “No niego que sea bueno; simplemente pertenece a otro linaje de literatura, uno que a mí me cansa.” When an interviewer pressed him on Latin-American “magical realism,” Borges replied that he preferred “magias más sobrias, como las de Chesterton o Kipling,” writers who could hint at the fantastic without what he felt was the tropical excess that saturates García Márquez’s Macondo. In short, he acknowledged the novel’s force but, true to his own taste for concision and irony, found its exuberance exhausting and never finished it.

>>24576795
Wrong

>>24576583 (OP)
This book convinced me that we should loosen restrictions on immigration as restitution for how we meddled in the affairs of other nations just to manage the cost of bananas. The citizens of those nations are victims of our greed, and of all things we could have chosen as justification for our crimes we ended up committing those crimes just for the price of fucking fruit.

Okay, this book didn't actually convince me of that, but what else are we supposed to discuss?

>>24576913
He also said:
>One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the great books, not only of our time but of any time.

[Cien años de soledad es uno de los grandes libros, no sólo de nuestro tiempo sino de cualquier tiempo]

>>24577027
He was able to pack in so much richness in the form of universal themes, symbolism, storytelling, and whimsy, that I was very impressed with the novel and had a good time reading. Not a sentence feels wasted which is rare.

100 years of solitude is the Lord of the rings of south america.

I think having a college lecture about colombian and latinomaerican history is necesary to really enjoy this book at a much deeper level.

Because not a lot of people know most of the references to XIX century and early XX century colombian history and folk details.

The traveling jewish and the mass killing of the bananeras could be miss understood or missed if one doesn't have like someone to point the context of all the references of the book.

My impression when I read it was that I was witnessing humanity first emerging from primordial mud, from the creamy swamps of stone age, as if the foundation of the city of Macondo was the first settlement of civilization and its inhabitants were all Adams and Eves, all of them still humid with the sweat of the dew of paradise. It's like the children of Eden modelling and pilling up the first bricks of Ur or Uruk, of Nineveh or Babylon (all the houses of red mud and of bamboo/taquara).

Humanity was at the same time more innocent and stronger, more ignorant and hungrier. The friendship and the butchery, the marriage and drinking rituals, the sexual hunger and the love caresses, the trades and crafts and arts and festivals: all of it seemed, in my eyes, as discovered for the first time by the inhabitants of the world of this book. When they made love, they did it with more power and pleasure than our current race; when they killed, they did it with more foaming savagery. Their veins still had primeval magma snaking and tingling inside them; their arteries still burned with an effervescence contaminated with the sweat of minotaur’s and the menstrual blood of sirens. It is a book that portrays a period in history but with the taste of something that came before history, before civilization, before the written word, before the invention of time. The first settlers, with the first house-foundations, will be the ones who will finally make time open its eyes and start growing conscious – as if, the soil being perforated to seat the first beams, time started to gush off, like newfound petroleum.

It begins with creation. Even the fauna and flora, with plants with tick and oozing blood of milk, flowers with golden pollen, butterflies and mosquitos emerging like dense fog, and the birds singing on the branches, the tamarins jumping from tree to tree, the fat salamanders crawling in the viscous vegetation, the araras (macaws) whose flesh is blue and taste like musk: this environment seemed as the original jungles of Eden before the fall of humanity. It begins with creation, but it will march inexorably until the crack of doom.

1/2

>>24577626
And then you get the same errors and weaknesses happening again and again and again, by generation after generation of characters, as if didn’t matter how much civilization changed, for the original and primeval world (where things still didn’t have a name, where men and women needed to point to indicate what they were referring to) could never be completely silenced. No matter how much technology and “progress” fertilized the world, still the original marrow of our bestial beings could never be suppressed: it kept screaming inside the bones and veins of the men and women of the book. Like the sweet and nauseating pulp of guava, there is no way to wash the taste, the nausea and the sweetness from this the people who are still and forever tattooed by the Dionysian stamp of the state-of-nature.

So this:

a) The sperm of Adam could never be dissolved from our species; the perfume of the apple never gagged, for it is forever entangled in our flesh: that seems to me one of the great themes of the book.

b) Somehow I feel that the author desired to portray the whole history of humanity – from the first shadows that crawled from the marshes of Eden (the slimy early-fishes creeping from sea to land), to the last cries of the last infants and the last whispers of the last ancients (whose backs carry the weight of all the thousands that lived before them) – occurring in one single town, during the course of mere one hundred years.

It’s a great book.

2/2

>>24576686
nigger

I own it but haven't read it yet. Read Love in the Time of Cholera and liked it more than I expected made my lil pecker kinda hard too

>>24576704
>>24576721
>>24576789
>>24577634

>>24577626
You're pretentious.

>>24577765
What does that have to do with anything? The book in the OP isn't in Spanish, retard. It's an English translation.

>>24577775
You're a newfag.

Aureliano is literally me.

Aside from a few anons most people on /lit/ haven't read latin american literature and activly claim it's shit, which to be fair when people push cheap sensationalists like Mr Marquez over here and Jorge Amado up on a pedastal I can't blame them. Almost nothing good has come out of this continent since the 1950s and it's mostly communism's fault, I say this as a crypto-communist. Writers got too focused on talking about social issues that it swallowed up self introspection and very very veryyyyyyy few people have gotten past that into a more nuanced view of humanity, Lispector per say. There are plenty of great latam poets and writers specially those who have that grimy third worlder type depressive sensitivity seen in eastern european and post WW2 japanese writers. It also suffers from having too much of a national focus seen even on the early romantics of this continent and thier obsession with national identity, anyone from around the world can read White Nights and understand it without further context on russian history or cultural background, while that's not true for every work by Dostoevsky it sure applies to most of it and it'sone of the reasons why it's so popular and resonates so much. You can't have that with a lot of latam literature
>>24576686
If you had mentioned french, italian or even german literature I would be inclined to agree but cmon dude we all know the english literary tradition is a meme.

>>24578175
'rena on the 'log

>>24577778
No, but you're pretentious and your writing is cringe.

As a veneco descended Chicano the book and the film have a slightly nostalgic quality to it.
It reminds me of the stories of the old country my older family members would talk about.
Yes, including the incest, pedophilia and general violence.
There’s a reason we left.

>>24578328
NTA but people on this website reach for the word "pretentious" like it's pepper spray soon as they feel the first inkling of being intellectually threatened.

>>24576833
This 100%. It's like a latin american history book told from the viewpoint of the average person in a beautiful fictional way.

>>24578175
>Marquez the cheap sensationalist
>Now Dostoevsky on the other hand...

>>24577626
Kino

>>24578402
At no point did I praise him in my post. I just used his recently attained popularity with normies to make a point. But he is a damn good cheap sensationalist and his emotional tricks are actually quite dandy and elegant

If its good enough for Pynchon its good enough for me

>>24578456
Sure some of the events and behaviors of the characters in Marquez are dramatic and gruesome but it's all handled pretty gracefully and reported with a tone of convincing objectivity. Even though the unbelievable is happening throughout the novel, it's so well executed that it becomes believable. Dosto meanwhile has his characters shriek and burst into tears and give speeches as their primary modes of expression which is hard to admire. His novels lack the artistic execution and subtlety seen in OHYoS. You can't use a term specifically invented to criticise Dostoevsky and apply it to Marquez, then contrast Marquez with Dostoevsky. Come on now.

>>24576583 (OP)
I found it to be a warm exploration on Human dignity despite recurring tragedy and isolation. That said, it is a book that makes its points early. I think the novel gets easy points for having the weight and drama of 100 years collapse down to a single point in its final few pages. It is an incredible feeling, yet it feels artificial considering that is a feeling generated through the repetition of ideas rather than any greater synthesis. That all said, one thing that was incredibly enjoyable was how the prose had a variation to it. You'd be reading simple sentences with simple ideas only to be hit with the most beautiful thing you have ever read at times here and there.

>>24576583 (OP)
There's not much to discuss about it in the way that this board likes, everybody agrees that it's a masterpiece

>>24577765
I agree with him but I'll never forgive him for inflicting smug retarded monoglots like you upon me.

>>24577626
Matches the vibe I got from it before giving up. Primordial mud and a naive humanity, so young and so imaginative that they live at the mercy of their tulpas.
I probably won't ever finish it (I get my share of horny, irrational primates IRL) but you wrote a nice review.

>>24576583 (OP)
>>24576704
Book is trash, literally zero redeeming merit. Midnight's Children mogs it.

2whimsical4me, had to put it down when the chapter opened with a nigga riding a magic carpet

>>24579351
>zero redeeming merit
must redeem

>>24579351
I like Midnight's Children too but it's just the more contrived pretension version of the OP. It really fell apart in devastating fashion towards the end with the Pynchon aping, the ultimately bathetic device of Saleem asking a series of questions to highlight a dramatic point, and the dumb shit about Shiva's knees where you could tell Rushdie just didn't have better ideas. The whimsical world of Marquez however is harmonic and airtight

>>24579351
saar midnight child better saar

>>24579577
That sounds based though, wtf

>>24578377
It's hardly ever used and that post was extremely pretentious.
>My impression when I read it was that I was witnessing humanity first emerging from primordial mud, from the creamy swamps of stone age, as if the foundation of the city of Macondo was the first settlement of civilization and its inhabitants were all Adams and Eves, all of them still humid with the sweat of the dew of paradise. It's like the children of Eden modelling and pilling up the first bricks of Ur or Uruk, of Nineveh or Babylon (all the houses of red mud and of bamboo/taquara).
>Humanity was at the same time more innocent and stronger, more ignorant and hungrier. The friendship and the butchery, the marriage and drinking rituals, the sexual hunger and the love caresses, the trades and crafts and arts and festivals: all of it seemed, in my eyes, as discovered for the first time by the inhabitants of the world of this book.
>[goes on in a second post]
Lol.

Eat shit, fag.

>>24578377
You are correcto

>>24580019
what's pretentious about that?

>>24578377
>>24580069
>if you call someone pretentious it's because their genius has made you feel insecure
Cool narcissism but smugness and condescension is a cope for pretentious retards who live in fear of eventually being called out on their bullshit.
>>24580072
Putting on airs that amount to nothing more than banal platitude the (e.g. you could insert those posts into a thread about almost any novel, adapt the few and far between references made to the text, and thereby render its superficiality obvious), ridiculously grandiose like a bipolar midwit cycling high or a lit freshman bloviating after doing coke for the first time, and if that isn't enough check out the last paragraph where he assumes a full understanding of the dawn of man by way of nothing more than cliches.
>Their veins still had primeval magma snaking and tingling inside them; their arteries still burned with an effervescence contaminated with the sweat of minotaur’s and the menstrual blood of sirens.
Lol.

>>24576686
You are brown.

>>24580261
Ironically you sounded more pretentious here than whoever wrote that post that makes you seethe.

>>24578175
Why post ugly women?

>>24580517
she's a qt

>>24577755
I read both and liked LitToC better.

>>24580261
Who cares

>>24577627
Now I want to read it

>>24576686
Small brain pleb shit