Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude

Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude with this line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” What a marvelous way to begin a story, so alive with the world in its very clauses, just as William Blake suggests exist within a grain of sand. So much is going on here and yet Marquez presents his world, Macondo, the fictional community that figures predominantly in many of his stories, with the kind of fluidity that is pure music.

Notice how he begins this sentence: “Many years later.” There’s something wonderfully vague about this beginning. Not five years or twenty years or even the one hundred years in its title, but “many years” as though time is a flowing river blending effortlessly into the sea. Even this beginning suggests a media res, a middle of things, a violent disruption of order. Here is a history being suggested, whether the history of Colonel Buendía or a history of Macondo or a history of Latin America. The sentence sets the reader up for a tale that goes beyond the singular, and frankly violent moment of its beginning. Someone will die, but this death is but a moment in a far bigger canvas. Marquez pitches his novel backwards and forwards in time, beginning with the Colonel facing a firing squad, then moving further back to his childhood. We know in the sparsest sense what this childhood might entail. There is something magical about the idea of “discovering ice,” as though this memory not only encapsulates a “distant afternoon” of the colonel’s childhood but of history itself. Marquez further drives this impression home in the following sentences with “a bed of polished stones...like prehistoric eggs” or of a world “so recent that many things lacked names...” This is the way a child might see the world: huge and new and strange and wonderful. The first sentence sets up this magic and what will soon follow throughout the entire novel.

I mentioned before about a violent disruption, but the entire sentence is full of disruptions and contradictions. The clause “as he faced the firing squad” is as violent a disruption as any sentence can bear. It punches its way through brutally and unforgivingly, interrupting the rhythm of the sentence with a rhythm of its own, as all acts of violence must. Yet this violence is well into the future, a future that pushes further outward as the sentence continues. From there Marquez establishes another rhythm, one that is much more languorous, as though one falling into a daydream to escape the unpleasant or mundane, and indeed Colonel Buendía is facing the violent end of his life. Yet, as the old saying goes, his life flashes before his eyes, unfolding delicately like onionskin. Marquez fully builds his world with the complexities that it contains. There is the end of history and the beginning of it as well. There is death and birth, destruction and renewal. One can read this single line and have a sense of an entire story. We might not know who Colonel Buendia is or why he is being executed, but it is the very ambiguity of these questions that fuels the beauty of this first sentence and why it pulls me in as a reader. 

The best stories are the ones that leave enough space for writers to enter. They reveal only what is necessary and allows the reader to fill in the white spaces with her own imagination. Marquez creates a first sentence that is balanced beautifully between what is there and what is imagined. We do not need a fully descriptive passage of what Buendía looks like or what his executioners look like. And yet there they are: as real as what could possibly have been written on page. This is the world Blake refers to. Within one sentence, with carefully selected words, Marquez is able to construct a world in which, as the novel soon unfolds, a world so fully realized, so fully contradictory and ambiguous and magical, that it leaps off the page.

Pulitzers Awarded: Manning Marable Wins Recognition for Bio of Malcolm X

The late Manning Marable's nonfiction book on Malcolm X, A Life of Reinvention: Malcolm X was awarded a Pulitzer prize today. A well deserved honor. But what's up with the Pulitzers not awarding anything in the fiction category? That's a question that's on everybody's mind today.

A list of all the award winners can be found at the pulitzer site, http://www.pulitzer.org/. Congrats to all the winners!

A Year in Review

Last year, I wanted to write a “year in reading” review for my new blog. I never got around to it and, since I had only started blogging a few months earlier, I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to review anyway. Now that I’ve got a whole year under my belt, I thought I’d take the time out this final week of 2011 to look back on the books that impressed me, made me think, or didn’t have any impression on me at all (there were quite a few like that).

Sizing up the last twelve months is a pasttime at the end of year. It’s a way for people to review all their triumphs and failures, things done and things left to be done. Reading has been that way for me as well. There were plenty of books I wanted to read but didn’t for any number of reasons. But I’ve not only had a chance to read some pretty great books, I’ve also had the pleasure to review them for this blog and for other sites as well. This post will address the books that I enjoyed and would highly recommend.

Fiction

I’ve read plenty of fiction books in the last year that were great to good to middling. The ones that stayed with me, sunk their teeth into my marrow and left their mark, have made this past reading year such a revelation. The book that lingers in my thoughts is Tayari Jones’s Silver Sparrow. Jones’ third novel creates an indelible collection of characters whose very heartbeats continue to thump subtly in my head. Told from the perspectives of two half-sisters whose father’s act of bigamy creates a tenuous but tense thread between them, Silver Sparrow addresses the compromises people make in the name of love with an uncompromising glare. What impressed me most about Ms. Jones’s story was how she refused to rely on any of the cliches or cheap stereotypes that such a story would provoke. These are not characters we are meant to despise or put in a simplistic box, but rather to embrace and understand even with their brittle flaws. 

What You See in the Dark, by Manuel Muñoz is another great entry in the fiction category. This quiet, slower burner should read like genre fiction, a plunge into the shadowy back alleys of San Bernardino and Hollywood, a noirish take on reality and fantasy. Instead it is a quiet meditative look at dreams unfulfilled. What You See In the Dark, a tale of love, murder, and the cinema, continues to linger and have its sway over me. I had the real pleasure of interviewing author Muñoz for Creosote Journal, which was certainly a highlight of my blogging year.

While I gave Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel a mixed review, I admire her willingness to push the envelope in terms of novel structure and form. Less a novel than a series of interlocking tales, she uses various forms from short story to play to court transcriptions, comic strip panels, and others to bring to life a little known era in Asian American political history. But more than that, I Hotel is the story of California and of America. Whatever flaws the novel might have, they are more than made up for its tenacity.

The Barbarian Nurseries by Hector Tobar is a fascinating look at Los Angeles as seen through the eyes of the fierce and uncompromising Araceli N. Ramirez, a housekeeper who is thrown headlong into the marital drama of her employers. Anyone who is from Los Angeles will recognize this love poem to that sprawling, diverse, and always-evolving city.

Nonfiction

There are a few books of nonfiction that have had an impact on me this year. Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People is one such example. Aside from giving the rundown on how the definition of whiteness began in antiquities and continues to this day, what I remember and enjoy most about Painter’s work is that she is a born storyteller. Her ability to bring to life what could have been dry facts and research into fascinating stories about the history of Europe and America as seen through a racialized prism is superlative and thoroughly engaging.

Manning Marable’s long-awaited biography on the intriguing Malcolm X is another work of nonfiction that made waves this year. A Life of Reinvention: Malcolm X uncovered a lot of ground that The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley could not. What emerges is a man of complexity, a work in political and social progress, but someone far more human and flawed than previous hagiographies. Marable, who passed away this year just as his tome was being published, had an engaging but unobtrusive writing style that allowed his subject to burn defiantly through the work itself.

Journalist Isabel Wilkerson covers the scope of 20th Century African American history through her retelling of the Great Migration, a period of social revolt as African Americans migrated out of the south between World War I and the 1970s to seek better opportunities in the north and west. The Warmth of Other Suns focuses on three individuals---Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster---who left their homes and families in the deep south and sought economic opportunities and social freedom in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. As personal and intimate a historical account as you'll ever read, Gladney, Starling, and Pershing Foster, by the end of the book, will have become like good, old friends.

Like Irvin Painter, Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD is also a born storyteller as revealed in his 2011 Pulitzer prizewinning account of the biography of cancer, The Emperor of All Maladies. Considering that the 571 page book uncovers a lot of historical as well as medical and scientific ground, this skill proves quite adept at helping laypersons such as myself to understand the often complicated and very complex web that makes up cancerous genes and the medicine developed to combat them. The Emperor of All Maladies was eye opening. Months after I read it, I still recollect it whenever I chance upon an article about cancer or cancer research.

The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A Wilding didn’t get the kind of fanfare that the previous nonfiction works had when they were published, and that is a disservice not only to the author Sarah Burns but most importantly to the subject itself, which, over twenty years later, deserves a historical review. Covering the story of the four young black and hispanic men who were unjustifiably charged and sentenced for the rape of a central park jogger in the late 1980s, Burns, like a good investigative journalist, covers all the grounds which led to the conviction and reveals how citizens of a city mired in racial politics and animosities willingly believed the men were guilty despite a shred of evidence linking them to the victim. The book’s ending, a bittersweet one with the eventual release and exoneration of the now grown men, continues to haunt. Will this happen again? Burns asks. Considering that the NYPD is now currently under investigation for its racial profiling practices, the answer should give everyone pause.  

Francisco Goldman’s tender memoir Say Her Name is like a sad song---it stays with you long after the last refrain. Haunting, elegiac, and beautiful, Goldman’s momento mori to his late wife, Aura Estrada, is like the memorial to her that he kept in his New York apartment: full of tiny, intimate details of the life they shared. While there were moments I questioned the appropriateness of Goldman's revelations, I was thoroughly touched and saddened by his loss, as though I knew these people and their grief was my own. Very few works of art touch me this way, and Say Her Name is but one.

Memorial Day War Stories

War stories are the most enduring stories of all. That’s a rather depressing thought, but no less truthful. War stories go as far back as the Illiad, and continue to be written about, produced for film and television or for the theater.

What is it about war stories that continue to sway audiences? What do we gain from them? When Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan was released more than a decade ago, it opened our eyes about the true costs of war and the bravery of the men who fought in WWII. But if it was designed to caution us, we did not heed its warning. Within two years of its release, we were in Afghanistan. And two years later, we were fighting in Iraq. Both wars were painfully unnecessary (as the recent killing of Osama bin Ladin has pointed out), and the fear and jingoism which brought us into both conflicts now seem of a different time and place.

During that time we were presented with more war stories. Hollywood played its part by releasing films such as In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Lions for Lambs, and The Hurt Locker, which won its director Kathryn Bigelow an Oscar in 2010. Documentaries such as Restropo (whose co-director Tim Hetherington was recently killed while documenting the war in Libya), No End in Sight, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 demonstrated the power of documentaries to tell war stories in all their raw authenticity. The number of fictional tales about Iraq or Afghanistan have been scant, but war stories are still being written. Both Denis Johnston’s Tree of Smoke and Karl Marlantes’ Matterhorn are about the Vietnam war. Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner takes place during the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan and follows through to the rise of the Taliban. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun hauntingly details the civil strife that occurred in Nigeria during the 1960s. And then there was James McBride’s Miracle at St. Anna, a WWII story about black soldiers which was made into a film directed by Spike Lee. In non-fiction, which has taken up the slack of war reporting, there is Sebastian Junger’s War, Brandon Friedman’s memoir The War I Always Wanted, Dexter Filkin’s The Forever War, David Finkel’s The Good Soldier, and a wealth of others. Television presented us with the miniseries Band of Brothers and The Pacific, both about WWII; Generation Kill, about Iraq; Army Wives, and Saving Jessica Lynch, an NBC movie that was rightly criticized for its inaccuracies.

Then of course there are the classic war novels and films: War and Peace, The Red Badge of Courage, All Quiet on the Western Front, A Farewell to Arms, Catch 22, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Send Me Home; Apocalypse Now, The Bridge on River Kwai, Patton, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Back to Bataan, M*A*S*H, Platoon, Glory, and so many others, many of which starred John Wayne.    

But the question still remains. What draws us to these stories? I suppose it all depends. There seems to be three different types of war stories out there. There are those stories which validate the actions of war as an heroic endeavor: men testing out their mettle on the battlefields, true leaders rising to the challenge of defeat and victory. These are the tales of the Illiad, of Shakespeare’s Henry V, of Patton, of The Green Berets. Then there are the stories that are meant to simply document the war experience: Saving Private Ryan, Hamburger Hill, All Quiet on the Waterfront, The Hurt Locker, HBO’s documentary Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam and Generation Kill. Then there are the anti-war stories, the stories that are meant to caution, to horrify, to provoke. Films like Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July and Platoon, Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, Redacted, and The Tillman Story, a documentary about fallen U.S. Army Ranger Pat Tillman, whose death from friendly fire was misused by the Bush Administration as propaganda, fall easily into this category.

Depending on what audiences are searching for at any given moment, war stories offer insightful glimpses into what it is like to be on the battlefield, to witness the horrors of carnage and destruction, and to suffer from its aftermath. They, like horror stories, push us to the mouth of hell and bring us back to safety. Unfortunately, what they cannot do is teach us somehow to avoid them in the first place.

This Memorial Day I dedicate my post to my late grandfather, Paul Buford Shipman, a WWII veteran.