One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Kind of like getting a fat sack of weed that looks, smells, and feels beautiful to the touch but when you tear it up and smoke it, it's just some mids that wear off too quickly. You've had much better stuff before in smaller quantities that you preferred for their intensity and while you don't mind the fat sack, it's a bit of a slog to finish it off and you can't wait until your next one. I feel sorry for the women in Gabriel's life since most of the romance in the book is sparked by molestation. On the upside, it's still ambitious, entertaining, and pretty funny.

:laughing: That sounds like an analogy that you have really lived through!
I read that book way back when "magic realism" was a new term, and I also didn't really get the reason for the book's reputation. I think I was affronted because there was too much magic and almost no realism.

That's a book I'd enjoy reading myself! In fact, I have a Beefheart biog by the same author

In the mid-20th century then?

Unfortunately lol

It's definitely enjoyable and is easy to read when you enter it without expectation, which is probably the reason for its popularity. The structure being somewhat recursive was very well done, so I think if he fleshed out the details of the events in the book more, it'd be the masterpiece I expected. There's a lot of opportunity for powerful imagery that he largely leaves to the reader to imagine. The famous Remedios ascension only being about two paragraphs long is a good example of it, that easily could have been a few pages long. I guess that's a factor in the realism aspect, since it's addressed as dryly as someone entering a room. I much prefer his influences that I've mentioned in this thread already: Borges, Rulfo, Cortazar, and Casares.

I read it long ago so my recollections are vague, but I actually kind of liked that aspect of the book. Mainly from an absurd humorous point of view though, in that it's a way of baffling expectations. But I get your point, and I just realised East of Eden (which I love a lot too) has the same shortcoming to a lesser extent: it's a bit tell, don't show sometimes.

Marquez could've shown a bit less of Jose Arcadio's massive dong imo. At the very least he could have gone into more detail on what the other dicks in the village were like.

:laughing: I had erased that from my memory

Aha! Please consider my post edited like this, jadis:-

I think Kurt Vonnegut did this in Breakfast of Champions, didn't he? At first characters are introduced with quite conventional descriptions, "a tall dark-haired man", but little by little the descriptions become more random, " a woman with an undiagnosed heart condition and a vestigal extra toe" before settling on penis size as the go-to detail to describe the male characters. Very neatly done by KV.

:laughing: Me too, I'm happy to say.