Reviews for Sto let odinochestva

The average rating for Sto let odinochestva based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-02-08 00:00:00 Darren Heil Revised 28 March 2012 Huh? Oh. Oh, man. Wow. I just had the weirdest dream. There was this little town, right? And everybody had, like, the same two names. And there was this guy who lived under a tree and a lady who ate dirt and some other guy who just made little gold fishes all the time. And sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn't, and… and there were fire ants everywhere, and some girl got carried off into the sky by her laundry… Wow. That was messed up. I need some coffee. The was roughly how I felt after reading this book. This is really the only time I've ever read a book and thought, "You know, this book would be awesome if I were stoned." And I don't even know if being stoned works on books that way. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which is such a fun name to say) is one of those Writers You Should Read. You know the type - they're the ones that everyone claims to have read, but no one really has. The ones you put in your online dating profile so that people will think you're smarter than you really are. You get some kind of intellectual bonus points or something, the kind of highbrow cachet that you just don't get from reading someone like Stephen King or Clive Barker. Marquez was one of the first writers to use "magical realism," a style of fantasy wherein the fantastic and the unbelievable are treated as everyday occurrences. While I'm sure it contributed to the modern genre of urban fantasy - which also mixes the fantastic with the real - magical realism doesn't really go out of its way to point out the weirdness and the bizarrity. These things just happen. A girl floats off into the sky, a man lives far longer than he should, and these things are mentioned in passing as though they were perfectly normal. In this case, Colonel Aureliano Buendia has seventeen illegitimate sons, all named Aureliano, by seventeen different women, and they all come to his house on the same day. Remedios the Beauty is a girl so beautiful that men just waste away in front of her, but she doesn't even notice. The twins Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo may have, in fact, switched identities when they were children, but no one knows for sure - not even them. In the small town of Macondo, weird things happen all the time, and nobody really notices. Or if they do notice that, for example, the town's patriarch has been living for the last twenty years tied to a chestnut tree, nobody thinks anything is at all unusual about it. This, of course, is a great example of Dream Logic - the weird seems normal to a dreamer, and you have no reason to question anything that's happening around you. Or if you do notice that something is wrong, but no one else seems to be worried about it, then you try to pretend like coming to work dressed only in a pair of spangly stripper briefs and a cowboy hat is perfectly normal. Another element of dreaminess that pervades this book is that there's really no story here, at least not in the way that we have come to expect. Reading this book is kind of like a really weird game of The Sims - it's about a family that keeps getting bigger and bigger, and something happens to everybody. So, the narrator moves around from one character to another, giving them their moment for a little while, and then it moves on to someone else, very smoothly and without much fanfare. There's very little dialogue, so the story can shift very easily, and it often does. Each character has their story to tell, but you're not allowed to linger for very long on any one of them before Garcia shows you what's happening to someone else. The result is one long, continuous narrative about this large and ultimately doomed family, wherein the Buendia family itself is the main character, and the actual family members are secondary to that. It was certainly an interesting reading experience, but it took a while to get through. I actually kept falling asleep as I read it, which is unusual for me. But perhaps that's what Garcia would have wanted to happen. By reading his book, I slipped off into that non-world of dreams and illusions, where the fantastic is commonplace and ice is something your father takes you to discover. ------ "[Arcadio] imposed obligatory military service for men over eighteen, declared to be public property any animals walking the streets after six in the evening, and made men who were overage wear red armbands. He sequestered Father Nicanor in the parish house under pain of execution and prohibited him from saying mass or ringing the bells unless it was for a Liberal victory. In order that no one would doubt the severity of his aims, he ordered a firing squad organized in the square and had it shoot a scarecrow. At first no one took him seriously."

Review # 2 was written on 2009-01-12 00:00:00 KAREN KUZMIN I guarantee that 95% of you will hate this book, and at least 70% of you will hate it enough to not finish it, but I loved it. Guess I was just in the mood for it. Here's how it breaks down: AMAZING THINGS: I can literally feel new wrinkles spreading across the surface of my brain when I read this guy. He's so wicked smart that there's no chance he's completely sane. His adjectives and descriptions are 100% PERFECT, and yet entirely nonsensical. After reading three chapters, it starts making sense... and that's when you realize you're probably crazy, too. And you are. We all are. The magical realism style of the book is DELICIOUS. Sure, it's an epic tragedy following a long line of familial insanity, but that doesn't stop the people from eating dirt, coming back from the dead, spreading a plague of contagious insomnia, or enjoying a nice thunderstorm of yellow flowers. It's all presented in such a natural light that you think, "Of course. Of course he grows aquatic plants in his false teeth. Now why wouldn't he?" This guy is the epitome of unique. Give me a single sentence, ANY SENTENCE the man has ever written, and I will recognize it. Nobody writes like him. (Also, his sentences average about 1,438 words each, so pretty much it's either him or Faulkner) REASONS WHY MOST OF YOU WILL HATE THIS BOOK: I have to engage every ounce of my mental ability just to understand what the *@ is going on! Most people who read for relaxation and entertainment will want to send Marquez hate mail. Also, there are approximately 20 main characters and about 4 names that they all share. I realize that's probably realistic in Hispanic cultures of the era, but SERIOUSLY, by the time you get to the sixth character named Aureliano, you'll have to draw yourself a diagram. Not even the classic Russians suffer from as much name-confusion as this guy. On an uber-disturbing note, Marquez has once again (as he did in Love in the Time of Cholera) written a grown man having sex with a girl as young as 9... which is pretty much #1 on my list of "Things That Make You Go EWW!!!" He makes Lolita look like Polyanna on the virtue chart! (Note to authors: You give ONE of your characters a unique, but disgusting characteristic and it's good writing. Give it to more than one, and we start thinking we're reading your psychological profile, ya creep!) If you feel like pushing your brain to its max, read it. The man did win the Nobel after all, it's amazing. But get ready to work harder to understand something than you ever have before in your life. And may God be with you. FAVORITE QUOTES: (coincidentally also the shortest ones in the book) She had the rare virtue of never existing completely except at the opportune moment. He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians. Children inherit their parents' madness. He really had been through death, but he had returned because he could not bear the solitude. The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows. He was unable to bear in his soul the crushing weight of so much past. It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment. A person doesn't die when he should but when he can.