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 Pointless ramblings... October 26, 2007
16 out of 29 found this review helpful
Yes, I can see I'm in total disagreement with everyone else who has reviewed this book. And I'm aware that it has a huge reputation. And before you ask, I do know what magical realism is, and I do read long novels about successive generations.
I just don't think this is very good.
Behind the hype and the endorsement of Salman Rushdie (always sets off my "pretention radar"), this is a long, rambling, incoherent story about many generations of Colombians. I understand that it is supposed to mix fantasy with reality, but even so, there has to be some point. There has to be a basic purpose, a reason to have picked up the pen. It is hard to see what that purpose might have been.
Besides being colossally annoying in their own right, the characters all divide into the same two categories. The women all reject the one who loves them and whom they adore, only to spend the next sixty years cooped up in a room, crying. This is punctuated every decade by a spasm of uncontrollable housework. The men all disappear for years at a time, and languish around the house doing pointless hobbies, with money periodically falling into their laps for no good reason. Is that great writing? I don't think so.
The book meanders and wanders in and out of scenarios. It is hard - not to say impossible - to pick out any coherent themes, or to see what Marquez is trying to communicate. Whatever it is, he failed - and since his job is to communicate to the reader, that's fairly unimpressive. Great writers can use metaphor or allegory, and tell you something important in a way that makes you open your eyes - look at Animal Farm, for example. But this novel appears to presume that, since it is lofty by nature and seems to have no point, you will presume that it is incredibly clever, and you're not. Don't be fooled.
If you want a lengthy generation-saga, read Tolstoy's War and Peace. There, you'll find everything about life, and death, and love, and war, and everything in-between. Magnificent. If you want magical realism, read Gunther Grass' The Tin Drum. It has powerful things to say about mass panic, the rise of Nazism, how mobs can be agitated. That's why you're prepared to read about a dwarf running around wartime Germany.
But this; this begins nowhere, ends nowhere, and between times takes you on a rambling discourse to no good effect. Sure, Marquez has a nice turn of phrase, and a flighty imagination. But he has no point. At the end, you are none-the-wiser about the human condition. You have not asked, or challenged, your own perceptions of the world. You're just plain relieved it's all over.
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