Three Hundred Pages of Confusedness

Marquis' classic is by all accounts the best Spanish thing since Don Quixote. As I've only seen a poor ballet interpretation of the classic and a few vaguelly related movies, I can't comment on that comparison but 100 Years of Solitude is hardly what you'd expect near the top of a language's literature. Obviously, English speaking people are inherently superior to Spanish speaking people, proved decisively in the Spanish invasion of 1588, where Clive Owen single handedly defeated the Spanish Armada but you'd still hope for something better than this.

The book didn't exactly disappoint but it certainly wasn't the classic I'd expected. I am a great fan of Louis de Bernières, a self expressed "Marquis parasite" who produced a trilogy of novels in the style of 100 years of solitude. The similarities are powerful, but Bernières follows one generation and adopts an unambiguous underlying political message, in contrast to the weird, winding pathways in Marquis opus.

The good things

• Its certainly not all bad, critics pose it as an exemplar of magical realism and that it is. Similar to Bernières who perfects the idea, the supernatural is deemed mundane. Tarot card reading, premonitions and ascensions to heaven are described in the same rambly style as the romantic involvements of the main characters, without even the characters involved noting any particular disbelief. Fantasy does itself a favour when it doesn't take the fantasy too seriously and focuses on the story, this (mostly) avoids the pitfalls of the post-Tolkein, pre-Gaimen era.
• The characters, who make up the subject matter of the book, are ridiculously vivid and jump out of the page hitting you with a laugh out loud, gasp out loud and cry out loud moments.
• One of the central themes is time, and Marquis manipulates, and dances on the concept of time with the expertise of a Star Trek writer. Never has a novel stated the rather obvious "history repeating itself" message in such an eloquent manner. However, it is its rather ambiguous treatment of time which makes for its greater failings.

The bad things

• Its really, really confusing. Characters have the same name, you can be twenty pages through a particular little plotline and suddenly realise the author is talking about a different character. Although this plays neatly into the time theme, it also makes it incredibly frustrating read at times. 
• Most of those vivid characters reside in a single dimension, as you'd expect from a novel which describes a families history, you only get fleeting glimpses, but as described in the novel, you tend to get quite polemic character traits, that although often exchanged between confusing names, remain pretty constant.
• At times, you feel Marquis phones in a section. The peculiarity of magical realism appears to make ascending a character to heaven or having them disappear and reappear particularly easy, rather than explaining things. And just occasionally, there is a focus on the magicalness which loses touch with the plot.
• It is very politically ambiguous. He seems to be trying so hard not to make a statement, yet the unthinking sexism/racist ideology seems to pervade everything slightly, ever so slightly. I don't know, but I don't like it.

It fails on some levels, but by no means on all. It is just surprising that this is given so much critical love. For its time, it probably was something completely different but its influence on post modernist writing means you have a million novels since which do it better without the negative aspects. Still, for you popular penguinites out there, a worthy and absorbing read, and probably worth it for the historical aspects.

New Directions

Warning: This is the first in a new trend for the blog, seeking to inject it with more life. From here on out, the thoughts of members on non-book club selected popular penguins will be permitted to be recorded on the wall of this hallowed temple. These have not been subjected to the rigid scrutiny of Popular Penguin Book Club and thus the opinions stated cannot truly be given with the type of excellent critical analysis hyou will have come to expect from the blog. Nevertheless, this provides an opportunity for wider discussion and anyone is welcome to contribute, reply with your blogger email and we will add you to the contributers.

For the record, here is the official constitution of Book Club, as declared by authoritarian proclamation by Leader Poms on 20 March 2010:

1. Never discuss book club outside of book club.
2. No books selected for official book club discussion will have been read by any book club member during the course of their natural lives before the selection of that book at an official book club.
3. Each book club starts with a human sacrifice to the Penguin, God of the Books.
4. After the sacrifice, each member gives their first thoughts, then discussion rages, followed by final thoughts and a ranking based on an integer scale between 0 and 10.
5. Membership is open to all, except obviously Jews. (Just kidding, we are all Jewish at heart).