← Zero to Well-Read
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- [00:00]
A
This episode of Zero to well Read is sponsored by ThriftBooks.com I've got a couple of editions of 100 Years of Solitude that you can find on ThriftBooks.com the first one is the pretty standard one you can find. It's a good addition. It's the one that I was reading. It's one Rebecca's reading in this episode. It's the 2006 Harper Perennial Edition. Subtle cover. You can get it for seven eight bucks in used condition on thriftbooks.com right right now. There's another one. There's only a few copies available of it right now, but if you want to get something that has a cool introduction, this is the coolest one I have found. It is the Everyman's Library edition. It's a 1995 printing and it has an introduction by Carlos Fuentes, the great Mexican novelist. There's only a handful available on thriftbooks.com right now. Can get for like $8 in acceptable condition. It might have a little wear on it, but these are pretty rare. You know we're going on 30 years ago since this was issued, so run over to Thriftbooks.com right now and pick that up if want. Not that many in English have an introduction that seem worth going out of your way for, but I think that's one. And if you're in the US and spend over $15 on your whole order so you can get a couple books here. You get free shipping and each purchase gets you closer to a free book reward as part of their reading rewards program. Thanks so much to thriftbooks.com for making zero to well read possible. Welcome to Zero to well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you read. I'm Jeff o'. Neill.
- [01:34]
B
And I'm Rebecca Schinsky. Today we're diving into the book that made magical realism a global phenomenon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's one hundred Years of Solitude. A quick little housekeeping. Before we jump in though, you can click the link in the Show Notes to sign up for. Our free newsletter comes out every week along with show notes and some bonus information about the books that we've read. Or you can become a member to get early ad, free episodes and exclusive podcast bonus content. Patreon.com 0to well read and a reminder.
- [02:04]
A
If you like what we're doing. You want more of this? Take a minute to rate and review whenever, wherever you're listening. Apple podcasts, Spotify, other arcane Android apps. I don't know what it's all out there. But if you're listening, there's probably a place that you can rate and review. The show really helps us find new listeners and keeps the algorithm liking us so we get to keep doing stuff like this. Really appreciate everyone who's taken a chance and you have a spare moment. You can just hit the stars right there in the app. And five is the easiest to hit. Rebecca. Just, just hit all five.
- [02:33]
B
It's scientifically proven that five stars is the easiest rating to give. Yeah.
- [02:37]
A
Yeah. And if you got feedback, got some really nice email. Since we record ahead, there's not really a good section for us to do. Follow up Rebecca, but that's maybe the kind of thing we're going to do in some bonus Patreon stuff that we're going to talk about if you are a member of the Patreon at the second level, the higher level. We're going to do a little director's commentary after each episode where we spend a few minutes, 10, 15, 20 talking about how we thought the episode went, things we didn't get to, other kind of random ass sort of talks. You know, maybe an office Hours After Dark cocktail hour kind of a situation.
- [03:15]
B
We'll see what mood strikes us each week.
- [03:18]
A
We can find over at the patreon patreon.com 02 well read link in the show notes and you can always shoot us an email@02 well read bookriot.com if you're looking for something. Got an idea. Always interested in what books you're especially interested in hearing about. All right, we're going to get into Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude and I think, Rebecca, it's important for to know that if you don't follow every beat of the plot of this, you're a bad reader. You're stupid and you should give up.
- [03:49]
B
You're gonna feel like a bad reader at some point in the process of reading this book. You just will, your eyes will glaze over. I was saying to you off mic, like it's possible to think you're going right along with what's happening and then your eyes glaze over at the one wrong sentence inside of like a four page run of things that don't really matter. But you miss that one sentence and you can be cooked for a little while. And that's okay actually, because this is definitely a reading experience where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is not so much about like making sure that you track every element of the plot and every single character, like 25 characters have the same name. So you're gonna be. It's gonna be unsettling. You're gonna be okay. We're here for you.
- [04:35]
A
And I think we're gonna get into what it's about and what it all might be. But I think that is a feature of the, the writing and artistic project rather than a bug. I mean, I think it confuses and confounds because history, life, art, military, civil wars, decades of colonial rule. It's confusing, Rebecca, and you can't keep it straight. It is illogical and is beyond the bounds of any one person to understand it. So we're going to talk about how that connects with Marques's larger project in a second. As dense as this is with things that happen, the plot is non existent, essentially because it's following a hundred years in the life of this mythical town, Macondo, which is sort of based on Marques's hometown in Colombia, but kind of like with Faulkner's fictitious Yachnicafa county or other places, it becomes an allegory for a real place where other things that don't happen or couldn't happen, do happen. But then things that do happen and did happen could also sort of get invited to the party at the same time.
- [05:38]
B
Did you track all of that?
- [05:39]
A
The Buendia family, that's. That's the family that it's the centers on their house and them, and it's seven generations and they come and go, and their paramours and their children and bastard pigtailed kids. And that's not a joke, that's something that actually happens.
- [05:54]
B
Actual tale of pig, not pigtail, the.
- [05:56]
A
Hairstyle, ghosts, shamans, civil wars, generals, colonels come and go, as Marquez is trying to wrestle with, represent and say something about modernity, about Colombian history, about his own life, all at one time. So there's Arellanos and Arcadios and all sorts of names that get Ursulas and Remedios. Yes, over and over. And it defies understanding. On a first, second, third pass I have in my hot take section. Did Marques keep them straight? Like, does he actually know which one he's talking about?
- [06:36]
B
Could he do a red string board for this? It's a great question.
- [06:40]
A
There is. I'll find a link to put in the show notes. The Wikipedia page for the novel does have a family tree that you have to click on, then expand and make the size of a wall to understand and see what else going into it.
- [06:51]
B
The family tree in the front of my Harper paperback is not Helpful. Like when I started it, I remembered, okay, this book has a lot of characters, it might be tough to track. And I, you know, dog eared the page of the family tree and thought, I'll flip back to this when new characters come in or when I get confused and like very quickly apparent, it's just, that's not gonna help you that much and you don't really need that.
- [07:14]
A
Just let it go, man. You just don't let it go.
- [07:17]
B
It's okay. Yeah. So as you were saying, it's set in this town of Macondo, which is mythical but inspired by Marquez's real life homet. Set from roughly the 1820s to the 1920s. And it's this period of the town moving from like a very secluded Eden where they're just there by themselves. Like in the beginning of the book, the solitude is sort of the people of the town and this Buendia family who are alone in this very kind of ideal, beautiful place. And then the outside world makes its way in. Colonialism happens, industrialization happens. A banana company comes to town and ruins everything. And as the outside world intrudes, like there's the loss of one kind of solitude, but the increase of isolation. The white world is, you know, starting to intrude on this Colombian place. And Marques is showing us, I think the chaos in the book mirrors what the chaos and the sense of loss and the wrestling with wanting to hold onto the past versus moving into the future. There's a lot of tension between allowing new things to come and the excitement of, you know, new discoveries. Like one of the opening scenes, one of the main characters, Grandfather's taking him to the circus type thing to see ice in a tent, like a big block of ice. And he says, this is gonna change the world. And there's this real sense of like frisson, almost excitement about what new things could happen. Magnets, you know, play a large role in an opening scene. But as the new things come, that's a double edged sword. And it's sort of about the erosion of this family's solitude, the erosion of one kind of culture, culture or one kind of identity really. It's so layered. Like to call it layered feels like an understatement.
- [09:09]
A
I think for those of you who've been listening along, it goes with two of our other picks that seem of a. Of a piece. Vineland and of course Midnight's Children, which I think are using similar literary techniques to similar ends, which is tried to capture tumult, chaos, incomprehensibility, the rapidity of chains, the circularity of time and politics, both these surface level turbulence or chop, but also underlying cyclical things that are happening. I think the idea of the cyclical and all three of those is super interesting. It's interesting that Paul Thomas Anderson renamed Vineland one battle after another. Right. And Midnight's Children also has a. These things happen again and again. We get repeating structures and the circularity of time is not subtext here. It's actually mentioned several times by characters about things happening again. Didn't something like this happen for. Can't you remember in the fog of history, not just of war here, kind of. It kind of clouds foundational patterns that even with all the change on top are still happening. But then at the end there is real change. There is real permanent change that ultimately does happen even after those long time. So it's very conflicted about. I don't. I actually don't know. That's conflicted. I think is very interested in trying to capture that contradiction of how things seem to repeat. But then at some points there's like a tipping point where it's just different and you don't know when or where it's going to happen.
- [10:45]
B
Or even that things repeat inside of the newly evolved world. Like there are these generations of men who are all named Aureliano and Arcadia and there's cycles and repetitions in the family names and in the behaviors that the families do. Like real family pattern stuff. Cycles of nature, cycles of society. Like people are born and they do ridiculous and impossible things and they eventually die. And then the next generation of them do some of the same ridiculous and impossible things and some new ridiculous and impossible things and they eventually die. And there's this deep sense of absurdity and futility, but somehow not quite like a throwing up of the hands futility. Like there, there is something to be said, I think that Marques is like arguing in some way for a. The value of like resisting some of this and also the value of embracing it. But like, how do you figure out where the line is and what to do with the encroaching impossible to hold off new version of the world.
- [11:47]
A
Yeah.
- [11:50]
B
This episode is sponsored by Cozy Earth. This year I'm getting really intentional about resetting my home, especially my evening routine, because that five to nine window is the part of the day that really matters to me. I've been building this little nightly ritual ritual with Cozy Earth and honestly, it's becoming my favorite part of the day. I start with a bubble bath, obviously I'm reading a great book. And then I wrap up in one of their luxe bath towels, which are so unbelievably soft, but they also dry you off really quickly. After that I slip into Cozy Earth's bamboo stretch knit pajamas, which are the kind of comfort that feels effortless and still looks put together. And then there's the bedding. Climbing into fresh luxurious sheets at the end of the night makes my entire space feel calmer. It's the easies to signal to my body that it's time to slow down, to rest deeply and to reset for the next day. Cozy Earth also makes it easy to try. There's a 100 night sleep trial and a 10 year warranty, which says a lot about their quality. If you're ready to start the new year with a true reset, head to cozyearth.com and use code BOOKRIOT for up to 20% off. And if you get a post purchase survey, be sure to mention you heard about Cozy Earth right here. That's cozyearth.com using code bookriot for 20% off. Cozyearth.com code book rio book Riot.
- [13:08]
A
Why it's important I mean this is maybe the of 20th century novels, this is the easiest to make the claim for because you've probably already heard of this book. This put Marquez on the map. He becomes and became a titan of world literature. And I think in a really surprising way, this is one of my other takeaways. Hot takes like, I cannot believe this book has sold 50 million copies worldwide. It defies everything I know about what a book has to do to take off the friction to sell like that. Really remarkable in that.
- [13:37]
B
Yeah. That a book this strange and hard to get your arms around sells this way. And I wonder, like, what's it like to read it in Spanish? Is it this slippery in its, you know, original language? I don't know. If you do, if you've read it in Spanish, please let us know.
- [13:53]
A
Yeah. And then also magical realism as a literary movement, device, technique, political stance is introduced. And we're going to talk about how magical realism appears here. And you know, I'm calling this original recipe magical realism. And it's been broadened and boulderized into different ideas and terms and usages. But having read sort of modern books that are characterized as magical realism since I read this first 30 years ago, you come and read this and you do realize that it's different. We'll put a link in the show notes. We talked to Vanessa Diaz on the Book Riot podcast about magical realism and the complexities but also there's a certain simplicity to it as well. But here you can really feel the. I don't know how you felt about it, but it's like, oh, this is what we mean when things are unremarkably remarkable. Like, it's so offhand that it's almost jarring in its unremarkableness. And I think that's the point.
- [14:46]
B
Yeah, exactly. The definition that we came to with Vanessa on that episode of the book Riot show is the supernatural as mundane, and particularly as it comes out of stories that are concerned with Latin American history and identity. Like, this is the sort of birthplace of magical realism. But things that seem magical to us as readers are commonplace and they go totally unremarked upon in the world of the book. And it's that way from the jump. Like, he doesn't waste any time showing us what the world is. Like. There's an image on page one of a character named Melquiades who is carrying metal ingots through town. And the way it's described is everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge. And even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared where they had been searched for most and went dragging along in turbulent confusion behind his magical irons. Like, a guy just walks down the street with magnets and everybody's houses are coming apart. And they just take this as, this is the kind of thing that happens. Gypsies come to town with flying carpets. And this is also unremarkable. Like in the first 20 pages, that the characters take these things as commonplace. We see them as magical, but it is just mundane to them. They know this happens, this kind of thing happens, even if they don't know why the flowers falling from the sky are yellow. They eventually figure it out and they know what to do when this stuff happens. Where in a realist piece of fiction or in some more like later iterations of magical realism, stuff happens, and then the characters respond to it like, oh, now we're in a magical world. We didn't know that this was where we were living. But the Buendia family and the residents of Macondo, it seems that they have always lived this way and that they will always live this way, that this is just how the world is.
- [16:45]
A
Yeah, The Nobel citation and Marquez's speech are both world reading worth reading. I'm going to quote just a little bit of the citation. A tragic sense of life characterizes Garcia Marquez's books a sense of the incorruptible superior to fate and the inhuman inexorable ravages of history. But this awareness of death and the tragic sense of life is broken by the narratives apparently unlimited ingenious vitality which in turn is representative of the at once frightening and edifying vital force of reality and of life itself. I think, I don't know if we had to power, we could do this real quick if we had a power rank the most inventive of the books we've talked about so far. Oh, I mean we're going to put Shakespeare to the side just for a second because the weight of that is unfair to everybody. It's too heavy, we can't. It's too heavy to get outside of. But if we put it with Rushdie and Pynchon, which I think is where it belongs, I don't know that we've read anyone else that really can hit with this. The density here of the invention. We get stories within stories within stories, memories within stories within fables. We get these walls of text, multi pages without a paragraph break that then sort of leads to one line of dialogue that serves as a fulcrum to another titanic wall of text. But each one of them, these are not blank walls, they are graffitied and they have fractal graffitis within the graffiti of minor characters and revelations and stories and fables and arcane knowledge of long gone religions that it's so hard to. It's so hard to know how to deal with. It defies most common reading experiences and tactics for understanding it. And maybe it's because I finished the book late last night, the last 50 pages and recency bias is a thing but I think word for word, subordinate clause for subordinate clause. I think Marquez is the champion of imagination and invention. Just from this very small to the very large. That's where I am today.
- [18:54]
B
I think he has to be especially in that triad of we're putting him with Rushdie, we're putting him with Pynchon because those guys read Marquez.
- [19:01]
A
Yeah, it's a great wonderful point.
- [19:04]
B
He does this in 1967, it comes out in Spanish, it hits the US in 1969 and Pynchon and Rushdie come after like their rises are later. They're clearly informed by it. The Rushdie is especially clearly informed by One Hundred Years of Solitude. And to be, you know, we're not scholars in especially Latin American fiction. Neither of us can read in Spanish. So I don't know who else is out There doing something like this. I don't know who he might have read. The books that are cited that. That Marquez cited as influential to him are like Faulkner, obviously, you know, Hemingway's in there like other greats of the early Joyce.
- [19:46]
A
I mean, Joyce is. Joyce is clearly the most direct antecedent. Yeah. Stream of consciousness writers, but they have.
- [19:53]
B
The stream of consciousness thing, but not all of. Not all the rest. And like he really does seem to have invented something from whole cloth that becomes like a template and an inspiration for other authors to riff on. And Pynchon is doing it and Rushdie is doing it and we'll talk, you know, at the end of the show about other folks to read, if you like this. But I think he has to take it because he's the one who invented the forum, functionally.
- [20:19]
A
Yeah. I was looking and I didn't see a reference to Quixote, which I assume just the Spanish language, but the world literature of it all. But I think Cervantes is probably as close as I can come to both the invention on the page with the invention of the scene of writing, the scene of reading here, inventing kind of a new reading experience. And I really do think it's more like the Bible than any conventional novel you're going to read. And I've got say more about. Well, I guess I'll leave it. I'll bring it up here since it is so like, you're not supposed to read the Bible all the way through, like page one to the end. Right. Everyone who grew up in the church or as an interest tries this at some point. Did you ever try this reading the Bible from the beginning?
- [21:03]
B
Yeah, I try.
- [21:03]
A
Everyone has done this at like 13 or 14. Like I'm going to master this thing. And it doesn't hold. And it's not meant to hold. It is not created to. It was not created by a single person, obviously, nor at a single time in the single religious tradition for singular political purposes. So it's a collage, a pastiche, whatever you want to say, by definition. And you go to certain parts of it for certain kinds of wisdom or certain kinds of stories. Right. And you cite it chapter and verse, not by page number. So you can go and find that story and sort of deal with it on its own terms or that bit of wisdoms or that letter from Paul or whatever. And I think there's an element, I would kind of like a version of this that cites these moments, chapter and verse, so that you can go find that particular story about the birds flying into the windows. Dead already. What was that story again? And then deal with the smallness. Not the smallness, but the individual. I guess individual is a better way of putting it, the individual moments in characters. Because I felt reading this page one to page 378, which is where mine ends, it felt like the wrong way to do it. It felt like you should kind of go to specific moments and it becomes a fable that you can access and dip in and out of. And that is a way of like accessing Marquez's invention, creativity, spirituality, without subjecting it to a sitting down and reading it all in a row all at once. You kind of almost need to reference it and dip in and dip out. I don't know. That's where I am today. Having read it.
- [22:31]
B
I really like that idea. It is kind of episodic. And it feels like to read it. I read it over like five days and that still felt like drinking from a fire hose.
- [22:41]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [22:42]
B
And as I was reading, I noticed that what was happening was the chapters are like between 20 and 30 pages.
- [22:48]
A
Long, which feels manageable.
- [22:50]
B
It's totally manageable. A chapter is totally manageable. And normally when I'm really enjoying a book, I will sit and just, you know, like, you want to take down as much of it as you possibly can. But I noticed that I would read one 20 page chapter and then I would need to get up and take some space from it. Even if it was like, I'm gonna take five minutes and do the dishes, or I'm gonna take 10 and walk the dog around the block or something. Like, I just needed to sort of take a breath and almost like shake the Etch A Sketch in between each one, because they do flow into each other. Like, usually the thing that happens at the end of a chapter is a setup for where you're going to open the next chapter. Not always, but most of the time. And they stand individually because the characters are basically impossible to track and the plot is beside the point. You could just do one chapter a day even. Like, I think this is the rare kind of book that really would lend itself to being broken up that way. Like one chapter a day for a couple of weeks and kind of dwell in that space and then be able to absorb what each of those, like, individual vignettes is doing and grasp more of the imagery. Because in a compressed period, like five days or I don't know how long it took you a couple of days to do it, the imagery, it has one effect of just like sort of washing over you like, I just felt, you know, like I lived inside one of those collages for a couple of days. Your head is just swimmy and that's pleasant. But I do think that it would benefit from a more spacious time and reading experience.
- [24:28]
A
Yeah, and I don't want to say that. I guess I want. I think both reading experience could exist side by side. I think they would offer different things because the more compressed reading experience that you and I did, five or three days or whatever, you get the effect of the tsunami of experience and idea that Marques is presenting. And I think that's an important part of what the book is. But I think there's behind around that could be another secondary encounter of slowness, of selecting pieces, you know, spending a moment with the clockwork. Whatever. There's so many clockwork things. Steampunk Marquez or, you know, this particular line or this particular woman's story or this particular representation of clothing or food. There's just so much there that it does seem inexhaustible work in a lot of different ways. Let's go on to talk about Marques a little bit. Born in 1924 in Colombia, raised by his grandparents in his early years. And both of them were quite influential. His grandfather was actually a retired colonel, considered a hero and a storyteller raconteur, who himself was enthralled by the invention of ice making equipment. Because, you know, this would have been. He would have been born in the mid 18th, excuse me, mid 19th century, where this is a real thing. And so I'll talk about later, I think this is one of the great opening lines in world history. But for all of Marquez's invention, the first line has a lot of realness in it, even as it's not true in the same kind of way. His grandmother apparently was a jokester and very matter of fact. And also she would embellish. And so there was in his early childhood a blending of what was true, what was there to make the story better or to elide or add on to what was actually going on.
- [26:17]
B
Yeah. He talked about how her storytelling really influenced his, that she had this deadpan where when his grandmother told stories, he could not distinguish between what was fact and what was fantasy in the stories. And that she could say the direct quote is the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice. And that, I mean, that's a very succinct description of what reading this book is like as well. Like the characters live inside a mix of fact and fantasy. Sometimes we don't know what's real and what is embellishment. And then later on, Marquez has like a sort of ground shifting reading experience with the Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka that does the same thing for him where, oh, you can use this tone, like he picks this tone up from his grandmother, but then he recognizes it in a work of fiction and it occurs to him, you can write this way. It's not just the way that his grandmother told stories, but you could write this way. And those two things are like the primary ingredients of the stew that create Mark Henry doing the work that he's doing here.
- [27:26]
A
I mean, this is maybe the easiest guess of an influential reading that you could possibly imagine. The Metamorph like I I having not even read Marquez's biography at all. And you said, okay, there was one particular reading experience that shaped him. I think Metamorphosis would have been my top five selections because, you know, Gregor Samsa awoke one day to find himself transformed to a giant cot. That matter of factness, that strangeness, and then playing out the repercussions of that, like, that's all there. It feels like it could be a two pager story or anecdote within the larger work here. Worked as a journalist before writing nonfiction, then turning to fiction. He was supposed to go to law school because that's what the folks wanted. Slacked off and read books. Thank you. Welcome to the club's Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
- [28:10]
B
This is becoming a through line in the backstories of authors on zero to well read. Was supposed to be doing this other thing and instead hung around and read some books and became a great writer.
- [28:20]
A
Unanswerable question alert. Rebecca. How many people that barely scraped by and didn't slack off enough and went to law school would have been tremendous authors if they just had a little bit more of the loser in them? Unanswerable question. His debut novel was 1960, the Evil Hour. And it's one of these, like, you can see what's coming next a little bit, but you also can't see it at the same time. I'm trying to say, like, 100 years of solitude was an immediate hit in Spanish in 1967 and it's his second novel.
- [28:54]
B
And then he doesn't have a novel out again until 1985's Love in the Time of Cholera, but he wins the Nobel Prize in 1982. So, like, largely, almost entirely on the back of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Like to win the Nobel Prize in literature with two novels out and only one of which like, that's how important and immediate of a phenomenon 100 Years of Solitude was that less than 20 years later you're winning the Nobel Prize for basically one book.
- [29:23]
A
Yeah. Even the writing of One Hundred Years of Solitude feels like it could be a story within it where he kind of has this idea, kind of an epiphany. One day sells the family car so that he can support he and his wife. He spends 18 months writing it. Just writes constantly. And then every night would sort of have dinner with friends to talk about what he wrote that day. You know, the progress, the ideas, the characters. Feels like itself would make a wonderful one act play. I have to say.
- [29:50]
B
He's like going to the pawn shop to get money to get the postage to send the manuscript off.
- [29:55]
A
Yeah. A real bet on yourself. Move from Gabriel Garcia Marquette. He again immediately becomes a notable figure in world stage. I think one thing that's hard to understand now, especially for those of us who are not super well versed in Colombian history, is he becomes such a figure that he gets directly involved in matters of state like treaty negotiations, peace talks, labor negotiations, and becomes a real voice for the left. We don't. I can't. There is no equivalent. I can't think of an equivalent in the. In American, recent American history. Can you? Is there anyone even close to like this?
- [30:31]
B
No. I was thinking it would be like, I don't know, if they'd been consulting Toni Morrison on civil rights legislation.
- [30:39]
A
Yeah. Which in a way would kind of make sense when you. But it just doesn't happen in this way. And Marquez has been called the greatest of all Colombians. Again, this is just one presidential address. But that someone may say that even erroneously shows you the titanic scale of his work. Let's see. Young love too. You want to say more about this? You put this in here. I saw this, but I didn't know if we wanted to talk about it. He's a romantic in his own way, but also not necessarily always faithful in a way we might understand.
- [31:12]
B
Yeah. So Marques first met his wife when they were both quite young. The reporting on it varies. Kind of seems typical for how slippery a lot of the stories about his life are, but seems to be like when either he was 12 or 13 and she was 9 or 10, they first met and like pledged eternal devotion to each other. He proposed when they were 18 and then they were married years later when he was in his early 30s and she was in her late 20s. But there's maybe some wandering around, some.
- [31:42]
A
Other women I've Got a great story to tell. Speaking of wandering around here in a little bit but let's move on to our most recent reading experience. Rebecca, when was the first time you read this book?
- [31:54]
B
I read this in I think late high school or early college on my own probably that faithful Barnes and Noble paperback favorites table that and that I knew this book was a big deal and I was trying to, you know, this was the point in my life where I was trying to answer those questions for myself. And like I wanted to. I wanted to be well read. It went so far over my head. I remember being aware that it was going over my head like I didn't grok it but I didn't know that that was okay that like at least not grokking some of it is part of the experience. Like the imagery and the dreamlike feeling of it stuck with me. I remembered that but at the time I didn't know like I hadn't read Rushdie, I had not read Pension. I didn't know about what magical realism was trying to do. So I just remember being like wait, what's happening? Like flowers are falling from the sky. It's a kind of imagination that I had never inhabited before. Read it once like in the last decade I think just to follow up with it and see like can I make more sense of this as a more grown up reader? Good news, you can but that was, that was my first experience. I think you had a similar first reading. We're both pretty young.
- [33:15]
A
I did you know independently reading in high school when I was trying to like broaden my reading to more world literature and I think I found a list or I probably was just looking at Met Nobel Prize winners honestly in picking some and saw something that was available at my local Borders RIP and then I read Love in the Time of Caller as well. I did them both back to back and I remember and I haven't read either since this I remember much preferring Love in the Time of Cholera probably because it was the character Stick around for more than a few pages.
- [33:47]
B
A little more.
- [33:48]
A
Still quite beautiful. A little more straightforward. A wonderful book. Again not at all like other kinds of reading but felt to me a little more manageable. I was trying to remember how I felt about 100 years of solitude. I think the best characterization give is when I picked up the book for this reading. I thought it was 600 pages long.
- [34:09]
B
Yeah, I did too. My copy is like 415 and I was ready for it to be significantly longer.
- [34:15]
A
So I can only imagine that that's sort of a vestigial memory that's calcified around the experience of, like, it just goes on and on because I wasn't sure how to make sense of it. It just kept. It just keeps going. It just keeps. Things just keep happening.
- [34:28]
B
Yeah.
- [34:28]
A
And you're given no purchase, really, to.
- [34:30]
B
What do you do when you've read for like 4 or 8 or 12 or, you know, 25 pages and nothing quite adds up?
- [34:38]
A
Yeah. Right. I don't know. I think the other thing as. As you get more experience reading, a couple things happened that combine to make you much more equipped to tackle a book like this one is you do have a lot more reading experience. So you have more experiences to bring to bear. More sort of internal angles to take on the bank shot you need to hit to understand this. But maybe as importantly, maybe more importantly, you know that sometimes you don't get it and sometimes that don't. Not getting it is part of the process, and it takes a second. Ready? It is overwhelming, and that is not your deficiency, but a challenge put forth by the author of the text for you to encounter and think about different things than you're used to when you're trying to figure out who committed the murder, who's going to inherit the family fortune or what's going to happen to the capital city or the kid or whatever. So I think those two combine. Where at this go. The text is the same. I am no smarter than I was then in terms of raw processing power, but I'm much more equipped. Like, okay, how do I think about my reaction to this? Take your reaction to this as being valid and then try to figure that into a matrix of meaning that is beyond. I am understanding the plot at this point, and I think that's super valuable. We're kind of all over the. We always are doing some foreshadowing of what it's about and what it's like to read this, Rebecca. But let's talk about some of the bigger ideas or the small ideas within the big reading experience here. Where do you want to go next?
- [36:10]
B
I mean, talking more just about what it felt like to go back into the world of this book. It feels to me to pull from art like you're inside a Dali painting. A lot of the time you can't keep track of who is who. It's on purpose. The repetitive naming. The first time I read this was like, wait, how the hell am I supposed to remember which Aureliano has done what this time around? It was like, okay, that's on purpose. He's shaking things up. He's confusing on purpose. So let that go and acknowledge major moments are gonna be buried inside these dense, fantastical scenes. But you wanna keep reading. It has its own gravitational pull. And in the same way that it's kind of enchanting to stand in front of a Dali painting and be like, why would the clock be melting? But if you can free yourself from why and just be like, the clock melting, like, it's obviously, this is what's happening. This is the world that we live in. The clock is melting. It can really cast a powerful spell, which feels on the nose to me to say about this book, but is the truest thing to my experience. It's about what it is to live inside of life that feels confusing and also beautiful and confounding and repetitive and exciting and sexy and there's so much tossed into it. This is a kitchen sink. No, like, the whole of human experience is just tossed it. And. And to just let it happen is, I think, the best thing you can do, I think.
- [37:50]
A
I'm not sure if this is. I'm not sure if the academic powers that be would sanctify this reading, but I think of magical realism as a subset, a particular manifestation of surrealism with its own history and strategy. But I did find myself, like you, thinking about surrealism. And then I got thinking about the etymology of surrealism. Like, sir, that. That. That Latin prefix means beyond, above and around, right? Not in place of, but in addition to the real world. And I found that very helpful to think about. Like, I really like that these element, these supernatural, magical moments are not replacements for, but enrichers of in addition to the real world. And I thought that was a helpful way for me to understand it. I think another thing that surrealism does and magical realism does, and it certainly happens in this, is it not only puts supernatural elements into the everyday, it also flattens the relationship of the everyday and the supernatural, so that everyday things that are amazing can be seen as amazing and maybe even more amazing than the supernatural. And again, the great example of this in this book is ice, right? Which, you know, Paul Thoreau wrote basically a whole book of the Mosquito coast about how wild it would be to introduce ice to someone who'd never seen it in the middle of a rainforest, right? Because it does feel like magic. It feels like, what is this subject? It should not be here. The ability. The ability to put things where they should not be is a technological advancement. And it is its own sort of twin of magical realism of something where it should not be. So these supernatural elements in the everyday, I think by contrast, also show that there are quote unquote, real things that should not be here, that are not welcome, that are not helpful, that are not part of what we do. Whether that's the train or a machine gun or ice, which is here called the greatest invention in the world, that's going to change everything. It's not that ice itself is going to change everything, but the ability to do things like bring something from a completely different climate and keep it here is its own kind of magic. It has its own kinds of consequence to import that we are so familiar with already. We don't quite see the transformative potential of ice because we've seen it all our lives. So that's, I think, something that's going on here as well.
- [40:08]
B
Yeah. And that technology and things we perceive as progress are double edged swords, if not like quintuple edged swords. That there is, you know, the appeal of, like, you get exposure to the outside world, so you get science and you get more knowledge and you get exposure to art, but you also get war and the death of culture and the loss of natural beauty at the hands of industrial industrialization. Like with power comes corruption. With an avalanche of foreigners that Marquez describes comes like beauty and new people in the town, but also this banana company that ruins everything. And we can't talk about the particulars of this book or the origins of magical realism without talking about how it is explicitly political. Even if the book doesn't read as a polemic about any one political moment. Marquez is overtly critical of white explorers, of colonialism. He's overtly critical of the idea of war. At one point, one of the characters is like, wait, so are we just fighting about power itself?
- [41:11]
A
Yes, it's like on the page, it was so striking to read that. And being there is no subterfuge or sleight of hand, it's just about power. And they kind of agree. And it's a moment of reckoning even for the combatants. Right. Some people even peel off and say, wait, I don't wanna be a part of this. And some be like, well, yeah, that's just what it is. Let's go.
- [41:28]
B
Yeah. And there's a passage where some character's grandfather is telling him about, like how politics works. And he describes what the conservatives are about and what the liberals are about. And I thought, wow, we're, we've been doing this for, we've been doing this forever and we're gonna keep on doing it. But that those definitions are so durable and that like seven generations of men in this book go off to fight different wars for the same ideas. Like really how repetitive and futile and absurd it all is comes. That's like one of the primary functions of repeating it so much is to show like how futile all of this feels.
- [42:07]
A
Yeah. And that history and culture and time is circular. Things keep happening and happening and happening. And then technological, political, scientific progress don't really change these underlying dynamics. People are still people, even if they can have refrigerators. And that can be distracting from the march of time. And quote unquote, progress measured scientifically or technologically may or may not have anything to do with underlying human progress or advancement and usually doesn't and usually exacerbates underlying dynamics rather than alter them in a fundamental way. I was thinking about how it's so much to absorb and one thing that Marquez is trying to is locate a specific town and person within the larger history. The book is a small infinity within this larger infinity of Colombian history, which is a smaller infinity itself than of Latin America. American history, which is a smaller infinity thing. Like it keeps going and going and going.
- [43:09]
B
There's kind of a Mobius strip quality.
- [43:11]
A
Yeah. There's an element to it. And I remember, I don't know, it was Richard Feynman or someone said, you know, some infinities are bigger than others. That idea completely blew my mind. Right. But I like this idea of like these nesting worlds of possibility. And he wants to tackle the small and the big. And this is an attempt, this is an artistic attempt to do that, to go from the very, very small specific to tackle huge waves, cycles, eras and epochs of human history. And understanding is really something else to watch here proposed against the kinds of understandings that are present. There are different kinds of ways of being elemental, sort of natural, magic, artistic understanding, performative, even sexual ability understandings present his own kind of epistemological world. But opposed to all of that. The technological, the scientific, the curious, the explorer in a good way, not sort of the conquering way. Is the military the authority of the military and authoritarian logic. That is the nothing to quote the never ending story that is which destroys everything else. It does not care about other modes of thinking and being. It does not see them. It does not interested in preserving or even acknowledging their existence. And I'll give you one quote here. Father Nicanor, which is one of the local priests. Father Nicanor tried to impress the military authorities with the miracle of levitation and had his head split open by the Butt of the soldier's rifle. So even in the face of a miracle, military and authoritarian logic does not care. It has its own ends, which is to control, dominate and seek power. And I think that's an underlying theme you can follow throughout the book as well.
- [44:56]
B
Yeah, even for the people fighting on the side ostensibly of progress, like the Bowindi media colonels are all liberals and they are fighting for what they believe is a, you know, a mode of progress, more freedom for people. All of kind of the same underlying values that we think of as being liberal and progressive today. But there is a point where I think it's the grandmother of the family tells one of one of those seven generations of men like you have spent so much time around these people you're fighting and so much time thinking about them that you have become like them.
- [45:31]
A
And I had a.
- [45:32]
B
Like, did Gabriel Garcia Marquez invent horseshoe theory?
- [45:36]
A
He might have. I mean, it comes at one point where, where the, the difference between the left and the right is depend on what color you can paint your house. Right. This one regime will let you paint it blue and the other won't. And that has sort of given us to be the complete and total difference in their thinking. And Marques, again, he's not a. They're all the same kind of a guy.
- [45:55]
B
No, no.
- [45:55]
A
But I think he is more along the lines of an Orwell, which is. Is if you get to a certain point on either the left or the right, that's about domination and totality. Without the express written consent to dissent, tolerate or diverge, you kind of come up in the same place anyway. And it's about who gets. One side wants to be red and one side wants to be blue. And everything else is about power.
- [46:18]
B
Yeah, that like forced obedience to any value system, even if it's the quote like right or better or more honorable. Value system is still a problem.
- [46:28]
A
It's time for our straight thoughts. Rebecca, we've got a lot of them today. Where would you like to begin?
- [46:32]
B
It seems right that a book like this lends itself to a lot of.
- [46:35]
A
Straight thoughts like the Bible. Just pick chapter and verse. We could probably play a game where we sort of do a random.org for a page and line number and spend 20 minutes talking about whatever it comes up with.
- [46:45]
B
Absolutely. You could totally do that. I could not stop thinking about what an intimidating translation task this must be One. What are you feeling on the day that you get the phone call saying, will you do a translation of one hundred Years of Solitude?
- [47:01]
A
Clear your calendar. Yeah.
- [47:03]
B
And for like how long? I looked around and I couldn't find like an essay or a good interview with a translator of this. I would love to come across one. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that. The other thing I spent a lot of time thinking about is would Garcia Marquez still get the Nobel for a book like this today that has so much like incest there? People are sleeping with their sisters, people are sleeping with their moms, people are sleeping with their mom, who knows that she's their mom, but they don't know that she's their mom. And then also like, we would call it pedophilia today. Like men like being attracted to little girls and then honorably just waiting until the little girl has her first period at the age of what, 12, to get married. And it's just taken as read inside the world of the book. Book. I feel like Marques gets a pass on it because everything else in this book is so fantastical and strange. But like it's not historical accuracy. Like it was not common in 1920 for men to be marrying 12 year olds. So there's. There's something going on.
- [48:11]
A
Yeah.
- [48:12]
B
Here. And I really wondered, like, there's a lot less written about this than I expected. I went googling to see, like, are we having renewed commentary about what happens to young girls in this book? Kind of surprised that we haven't had more of it. But I really wondered, can you win the Nobel today with a book that does this?
- [48:30]
A
I think that's a good question. I mean, all books are a product of their time. And even 1982 is far, maybe even farther away from us today than 1982 was from 1927, when Marquez was born. Sort of politically, it's sort of sexual politics. But I think you're absolutely right. There would be a different kind of understanding. And I think the book just gets written differently, with a more modern understanding. It's like something saying, would the book even exist like this if Marques woke up today? He was born today and sort of read the Metamorphosis today? I think it can't be the case. And that's true with all books. That's true. Not to try to excuse this, but.
- [49:02]
B
But shaped by a different set of political circumstances.
- [49:04]
A
Yeah, I think he is so. He is so interested in pushing boundaries within logic systems, moral systems, that this seems to me not a natural one. I'm not saying it's a natural one, but it makes a kind of sense. He's pushing these old kinds of boundaries. Right. That he's Pushing, like, between the magic and the real, between the profane and the sacred, and between the illicit and the allowed. At the same time, I think is happening that. I think it's quite uncomfortable to read a lot of those points. I see why it's happening, but it is a real thing that a modern reader definitely is going to notice. Probably differently than readers were noticing in 1968.
- [49:48]
B
Yeah, I just. I just wondered so much about it. And, like, some of the scenes imply maybe a little judgment or a little understanding that it's grotesque. Like that when that character, that the guy is waiting for her to hit puberty, when she gets her first period there, she, like, runs out into the living room to show her underwear to other women that are seated there and she's. She comes across as, like. It's just such, like. Such a little girl and, like, not knowing what's happening and behaving the way a little girl behaves. And then this man takes her and they go get married. And I paused there on. I think that Marques knew that what he was doing in this scene is grotesque, but it is so uncriticized throughout the book, and then he wins a Nobel for doing it that, like, you know, we're usually giving the thesis here of, like, try to get outside of your 2025 reader's lens, but it seems astonishing even for 19, 1982 to be accepting of that.
- [50:51]
A
Yeah, I don't think we need that. I think that idea of lens, like, I don't think we can get outside of it. But notice there are multiple lens you can use to look at things. Like, you can switch them out. Like when you're at the optometrist, like one or two, two or three. Like, use your different lenses. See, I mean, I think one thing we both believe is you can. It's both and not one versus the other. And I think using your own. I don't think you want either the text to blow away your own critical sensibilities. Nor can we. Nor is it as interesting to say, yes, and this is happening, and this is something we can understand, but also take the book as an object of inquiry in its own time. So I'd encourage people to use both sensibilities. And one of our sensibilities definitely is gonna be like, whoa. Whoa. That is really something.
- [51:36]
B
Yeah. One of my margin notes is just. Yikes.
- [51:38]
A
Yikes. Yeah. And, you know, similarly, like, there's. There is the knowledge within the characters that incest will lead to sort of genetic problems. Right. Like, the kid's gonna Be born with a pig and someone eventually is. And then the character says, I would have armadillos if it meant to be. I got to be with you. So it's like playing with this idea of what is socially acceptable and it's not acceptable just because of society versus what's actually wrong. And sometimes I think it's over the line, even, you know, from social acceptability is not always the right arbiter of what of how people should be in the world.
- [52:12]
B
Notably, both characters are full grown adults in that conversation about I would have armadillos if it meant I could be with you.
- [52:18]
A
Right, let's see, what do I have here? Could Marques himself keep all these characters straight if he went through it with a corkboard and yarn? Does it connect and hold and does it matter?
- [52:28]
B
I don't think it matters.
- [52:29]
A
I don't think it does either. If you got the answers. Like, you know, actually Marques had an Excel doc or, you know, whatever it was that he had, you know, quill and board or pieces of paper. Yeah, that's one. What else do you have on your straight docs?
- [52:46]
B
I could not stop thinking about the Odyssey. There is so much of the Odyssey in this, and it feels intentional to me. Like there are ways to just pick up things that feel like the Odyssey that might not be intentional in other works of fiction because it's, I think, just in that collective unconscious. But they tie an old man to a tree and it gives real Odysseus tied to the prow of the ship to me. But really the Odyssey thing that happens here over and over are references to weaving and unweaving. A character is weaving a shroud.
- [53:14]
A
Penelope Vibes, yes.
- [53:16]
B
Weaving a shroud during the day, unweaving it at night, but also like one of the Aurelianos is making and then unmaking these small goldfishes. He makes them and then he melts them down and then he starts over. And that's just one of the cycles in the book. And then I think on a meta level, that's what Marquez does in the book. That he's got this depiction of the making and the unmaking of this town and how the people wove this culture and then it was destroyed and they unweave it. The people themselves are unmade by the end. Like for a long time, nobody dies. And. And then once the outside world starts creeping in, people start dying and they are literally unmade. A lot of this feels like just a Homeric homage to me in a way that was Kind of surprising. And at first I was like, is he doing Homer here? But then once we got to weaving a shroud and unweaving it at night, it's hard to. It's hard to mix it up.
- [54:10]
A
It's always so hard to know, because when you're dealing with elemental things, you're necessarily gonna connect with other works of art that deal with elemental things. So I could believe both. I think this idea of Macondo as maybe a kind of Troy that bridges the mythic and the real is super interesting to me that one thing that Marquez is trying to do is, you know, we were talking about this in the context of Oedipus, right? Like, Oedipus is clearly fictive. Like, everyone who was watching Oedipus knew that Sophocles wrote it, and yet it was also participating in the mytho poetry of the day and extant myths. So sort of both. Which is way different than reading, I don't know, any sort of modern novel where there's no. There's really no sense that it's maybe sacred and true. Right. This Marquez is super interested, I think, in how we got from then to now. And part of that is not just the reality of it, but our own own imagination of it. And that's certainly the world of Homer. It's actually a little bit more the world of Herodotus. But that's a different podcast that we can get into some other time.
- [55:19]
B
We'll do that someday.
- [55:20]
A
I also was interested in the little goldfishes. For me, it appears a bunch of times, and every time, it's in the context of someone wanting to get back to what they really want to do. Being left alone to make your little goldfishes and do it in peace forever. Right? And whenever someone's like, I'm going to just. I'm going to abandon this military campaign or this business venture or this unrequited. I did love. I'm just going to go make little goldfishes. I'm going to give someone little goldfishes. And it seemed to be just sort of a talisman of the real human interest in being left alone to do.
- [55:54]
B
What you want, to create something and then do what you will with what you like. There's all. There's kind of a Buddhist, like, mandala quality to it as well. You make the mandala with the sand, and then you just rake over it and start over.
- [56:04]
A
And they're not. They're not. You don't improve on them. Right. You don't start clockwork. Yeah, exactly.
- [56:09]
B
It's an. It's also a form of resistance to industry. Just to make something for the sake of making it and destroy it. You don't have to sell it. And we would say today you don't have to turn every one of your hobbies into a side hustle.
- [56:20]
A
Right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. No sub stack about how make little gold fish is here for you. You had a couple other straight thoughts. Rebecca, what else do you want to hit?
- [56:29]
B
Oh, what do I want to hit? Oh, I just loved the idea in the book of insomnia as a plague, the characters suffer a plague of insomnia and once people in the household realize that some of them have got it, the other people flee because they don't want to have it. And. And like that's what insomnia feels like. It feels like a plague has come to your house. And I love that he reached for that. Would also just love to try levitation by means of chocolate.
- [56:55]
A
I was. Did Marques invent edible THC infused drinking chocolates? There's a lot less drug use here than I would have thought. But that's a different time and place. You would imagine. There's a lot of representations of different kinds of mind altering substances, but since you could just float sometimes maybe you don't need them.
- [57:14]
B
I think they use sex as a drug in this book.
- [57:16]
A
I think that's right.
- [57:17]
B
That's the mind altering substance. Yeah.
- [57:19]
A
Yeah. Notable quotes. There's many here.
- [57:22]
B
There's so many.
- [57:23]
A
Where would you like to try to go?
- [57:25]
B
I love the way he describes people. In Pilar Turnera gets described as a merry, foul mouthed, provocative woman.
- [57:31]
A
That's your tattoo. I had the tattoo candidates. I think that's a good one.
- [57:35]
B
I love my headstone, you know, give my eulogy someday and say, oh, that's a good one.
- [57:40]
A
Tattoo, headstone or eulogy for one of these.
- [57:43]
B
Provocative woman Jose Arcadia Buendia gets described as being fascinated by an immediate reality that came to be more fantastic than the vast universe of his imagination. Like that's the experience of reading the book. Normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war. Nothing ever happened. Just.
- [58:05]
A
That's a more of a Joseph Heller like line to me. That really felt more. It's catch 22. Must be on our.
- [58:11]
B
It is. Oh yeah. Catch 22 on the back of this book would be really interesting.
- [58:16]
A
Yeah. Let's see you've got some more. I'll take a couple of turns here. Innovation as forgetting, replacing the natural world. So here's the quote in the freeing of the birds, which since the time of the founding had made time merry with their flutes and installing in their place musical clock box in every house. So. And the technology not only replaces the natural, but is also so interesting that it distracts us from pursuing higher aims. Does this sound familiar to anybody? Jose Arcadio Buendia stopped his pursuit of the image of God, convinced of his non existence, and took the pianola apart in order to decipher its magical secret. So the piano is so interesting and its inner working so compelling and distracting that just understanding, making better pianos, making better apps, making better algorithms took us away from. Distracts us from sort of higher ends, more satisfying and sustaining pursuits. Where else do you want to go with quotes, Rebecca?
- [59:15]
B
Oh yeah. This one just sums up, I think, the experience of reading the book. It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. Like, there are moments where Marques kind of peeks around the corner and is like, I know what I'm doing to you. And that is certainly one of them.
- [59:45]
A
I do wonder because we talked about this strategy structural thing he does where there's like a multi page long paragraph that does come to a point and usually it's a line of dialogue or an exchange between two people that clarifies and crystallizes kind of everything that's come before. A big idea, a big moment, and then we go right back into it. So we get a momentary oasis. But I wonder if those moments hit even harder because we have been trudging, dealing with stuck in the muck and mire and then we sort of come up for air for a second. It's kind of exhilarating in its own way. And I don't know how much of that is. I don't know what his intention was. Did he know he was doing that or was it feel or something else? But it's an. It's. It's very Marquesian. I don't, I don't remember anyone else doing something like this.
- [60:33]
B
I had a similar feeling reading Midnight's Children. But again, that's influenced and inspired by this book where you're like, that paragraph was five pages long and there was no punctuation. And like, thank God someone is saying something.
- [60:46]
A
Right? Yeah. Is it, is it an admission or is it the point? I don't. I find myself both of them being possible is extremely.
- [60:54]
B
Then this is how I really want to go out. In accordance with her last wishes, she was not buried in a coffin, but sitting in her rocker, which eight men lowered by ropes into a huge hole dug in the center of the dance floor.
- [61:08]
A
So many burials, so many alternate ways of being buried. That's a whole graduate thesis seminar right there. Mortuary writes and Gabriel Garcia.
- [61:15]
B
You could like Sex and death in 100 years of solitude. Take it.
- [61:19]
A
People are buried and locked into rooms and boarded into rooms and boarded into chambers and sealed up. And they're. Here's the last one I want to get to. Yeah, it's despite. This is Me. So despite the human capacity for invention, we are still always ourselves. And this is Marques. Incredible things are happening in the world. He said to Ursula, right there across the river, there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys. Like, no matter where we go, no matter what we invent, we go to the moon and we're still our dumb old human selves. And that's just the way that it is. All right. Is it for you? Well, if you can't tell by now, maybe we can summarize a little bit. Rebecca, this is for you. If. What?
- [62:02]
B
Oh, if you're good to hang with unanswered questions, you read the opening line of the book. At the top of the show, we meet Colonel Arcadio Buendia when he is standing before a firing squad. That firing squad gets referred to over and over and over. Other people apparently go before the firing squad. So many firing squad gets mentioned. Spoiler alert. That firing squad never happens in the book. Like, we don't know ever why he was before the firing squad. And was the other Arcadio who was also before the firing squad, was it the same firing squad? Was it for the same reasons? Did these happen in total, totally separate times? Who knows?
- [62:41]
A
Marquez definitely missed the part of a grad school where they talk about Chekhov's gun.
- [62:45]
B
Yeah. Or where you have to pay off on what you say in the first sentence.
- [62:48]
A
Oh, do I watch this?
- [62:50]
B
Right? Yeah. Just no rules. There are no rules here. So you gotta be comfortable with that if you like. Or you're open to magical realism. Like, if you have enjoyed other works of magical realism or things that feel slightly surreal, as you called it. Original Recipe. Like, this is the most, you know, sort of unfiltered. It's not from concentrate. This is the real deal. Check it out. And if you don't need a book to have a Point. He is saying things in this book, but this is an experience of a read. It is not an A to B plot situation.
- [63:29]
A
Yeah, and maybe not. It's always the converse of for you, but especially if you were a plot reader or a character reader really because there are lots of names, but it's a little more difficult to ascribe character traits to them. They are figures throughout the book. But it's like your favorite character is going to be very well, milky 80s for me. But that's also a grad school paper we could talk about some other day. There are all kinds of. There's all kinds of violence and sexual trigger warnings, things to watch out for. Nothing is presented as harrowing, which in a sense.
- [64:02]
B
And nothing's graphic.
- [64:03]
A
Maybe troubling in some of these moments, but nothing is especially graphic. It does have a fable like quality. And that's another way where Amy Bear connects to Homeric, where more legalistic, conventional mores don't apply. Maybe they should, but they don't in these particular moments. The immortal questions that aren't asked. Which of these are primary here. What is the good life? How do I know my neighbor? What do I owe my neighbor? Pardon me? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? And the answer is yes, Rebecca. Absolutely yes.
- [64:40]
B
Yes, yes. Concerned with all of them, but concerned with none of them in a really overt way.
- [64:46]
A
Yeah.
- [64:48]
B
Or he's not concerned with answering them. Like there are not answers to any of these questions. I don't think in the text. I don't feel like Marques is where you go if you want answers. But in a real. Questions beget questions beget more questions. Uncertainty begets more uncertainty. But can it be kind of pleasurable and exciting? All of these are here.
- [65:11]
A
Yeah. I think it's maybe less interested in what's the deal with good and evil because it's just people. Right. They're not. They're not villains. Even in. Even in a book that is clearly about colonialism and Marquez being a leftist. There's no Darth Vader figure. There's no. I mean there are bad people, but they're the people that are sort of outside the frame, conducting the war that sometimes our people go and be a part of and then come back from. So it's not really about good and evil. It's about sort of a side of the human coin or the side of the human dice that gets Rolled. I think the how to deal with death is clearly there. The one that I find myself most interested in is his is what else might there be? Because we do see these characters that go off to explore. They try to understand things differently or invent something, or spend decades walled up into a study reading the same text over and over.
- [66:01]
B
Or there's like tarot cards.
- [66:03]
A
Like, I find myself very interested in Marques being interested in how else could we understand and be in the world? And those moments I found very compelling. And I've always found myself lingering on them. Relatedly, are we sure this is about art and writing?
- [66:18]
B
I mean, we laugh almost every time. This happens every time, but this is what happens with the great books. You know, like, not all books are overtly about art and writing, but I think great artists are concerned with it. Characters here are constantly reading and they're writing and they're referring to histories that are real and histories that are imagined. They're creating stuff, they're destroying it. They're creating it again. Yes. And then there's direct stuff. Characters discover libraries and they discover that fiction can be a way to have to have play and that literature can be a source of play and the source of making fun of people. And like, that's a great design, right? That it's a source of power. Just 100 million percent. This is about art and writing.
- [67:03]
A
Yeah. Could you get the just of this from watching the signal attention? Interesting question, because there now is one that you and I have not sampled. Netflix Multi Series one. Marques himself didn't think it could be done. Didn't want it to be done. He certainly didn't want it to be done in a language other than Spanish. And as sometimes happens, once the creator of the work goes away and the estate is super interested in other things than maybe necessarily what the artist would want themselves. It was optioned to Netflix and it debuted in 2024. You looked at more of the reviews than I did. And you said middling to positive. That was my sense of it, but I hadn't looked at the reviews myself.
- [67:42]
B
The reviews are middling to positive. It looks like the first series, the first season that aired last year, probably accounts for about 25% of the book. So they're gonna go several seasons of it. The reviews that I came across said it's very faithful to the plot related to that. Some of the reviews were like, it's a problem that. So faithful that it's uncritical about the men's relationships with young girls. So that apparently does get depicted on screen. The second season is due in 2026. I have mixed feelings about this. It feels impossible. Like, I think Marques was probably right when he didn't think it could be done. Didn't want it to be done. I'm grimacing.
- [68:30]
A
Yeah. My bullet point here is it seemed impossible to me when I read it and it still seem possibly to me now. Though I do want to try one episode just to see what compromises. You can't do it. You can't do the books. You have to make some choices. And the nature of those choices I do find fascinating, but I do not find myself compelled at all. Be like, yeah, I'd really like to see this on screen. And I'm a kind of person that sometimes wants to see a book I love put on screen. This is not one of those.
- [68:55]
B
Yeah, I think I would love to go to an art exhibit of, like, paintings inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude or like to spend an afternoon in big rooms with yellow flowers coming from the ceiling and to look at, like, a lot of. I'm sure there are surrealists that were inspired by this book. That's the kind of art that I feel like you could take inspiration to adapt 100 Years of Solitude imagery of the book. But it feels to me like a book that does things that only books can do. And. And in this case, I will probably watch one episode of the adaptation just also out of curiosity, but I'm not looking for that. It doesn't feel like an on screen experience of it will be additive in any way.
- [69:42]
A
Yeah, I mean, we haven't really talked about this, but you're hearing behind our reticence about an adaptation is that it is a construction of language. Like it's allowed to do things because language can compress all kinds of things in a way that other mediums really don't have the ability to do. And to try to expand them onto the screen seems like a daunting and. And maybe fruitless task to me personally.
- [70:09]
B
And also, like, the ghost of Gabriel Marcia Garcia Marquez might come back to haunt you for having done this.
- [70:13]
A
It might be right there. It could be here, we don't know. Making gold, Little fishes in the corner. All right, so. So let's say that we were making a. Is this a Muppet version? What's the Muppet version of this? Rebecca?
- [70:25]
B
I'm kind of into the chaos of a Muppet version of this. Like, super problematic because of all the problematic things we talked about.
- [70:33]
A
We won't. We don't do those Off. Yeah.
- [70:36]
B
If you put those off to the side. If we're not gonna do those. I think. Yeah, I think a Muppet version where the only human character is the first Jose Arcadio Buendia, tied to the giant chestnut tree outside and the Muppets come and visit him and the Mupp have Muppet chaos and they bang their pots and pans and just. I'm not down for the Muppet sex scene. So we're gonna. This is gonna be a PG rated Muppet adaptation. 100 Years of Solitude for kids, which is a concept I've never considered before.
- [71:05]
A
Ya version of this. What a weird idea that is.
- [71:07]
B
But that's. That could be fun.
- [71:10]
A
I mean, it might lend itself to a Muppet show like presentation where you're just doing scenes, right? Like the curtain closes and we're gonna open up in a different scene and then you close the curtain and a. There's something a little bit different. I actually would watch just a regular, like, sort of play version of that where maybe on even given night, like, let's say it's a theatrical performance where you're getting seven or eight vignettes, but each night's performance has a different arrangement. Right.
- [71:33]
B
I like that.
- [71:34]
A
Would be pretty cool to see Trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes, et cetera. I know very little literary gossip, but this was one I read and it stuck with me forever. That one time Gabriel Garcia Marquez got sucker punched by his fellow Latin American Nobel laureate Mario Vargas at a movie screening in public. Just came up and popped him in the grill. And the too long did not read it was over a woman. Marquez immediately ran to a photographer friend to have pictures taken. The pictures weren't public in 2007, but apparently it's the pictures of Marquez with a giant flipping grin on his face and a huge bruise. A huge shiner.
- [72:07]
B
Do we know who got the girl?
- [72:10]
A
Much like 100 Years of Solitude, it is so confusing about the relationship and nature of these things that I think is best left unsaid. You can use the old Google fingers if you want to know more about it.
- [72:20]
B
Maybe we'll just let that one stay a mystery.
- [72:22]
A
Notable sucker punches. I remember a story of Stanley Crouch sucker punching the critic Dale Peck in a New York restaurant. That might be a good bonus episode for us at some point.
- [72:31]
B
We don't get this in modern literature anymore.
- [72:34]
A
We really don't. You don't walk up to a dude and just whop him one anymore.
- [72:39]
B
Or even like feuding critics. Didn't Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.
- [72:43]
A
Have like a. Yeah, they did. You know, it was funny. This is outside the scale, but I think one of the reasons over the last few days on the Internet, the Tarantino slagging Paul Dano in which will.
- [72:54]
B
Be old news by the time this episode drops.
- [72:56]
A
It doesn't happen so often, but when it does, it's like, whoa. But it did used to happen a lot more frequently.
- [73:01]
B
This is a weak sauce. Weird looking guy in this movie. Yeah. And you're right, but just a walk up. Sucker punch. I love that. If we're getting one piece of gossip about this book, this is the one you've got.
- [73:11]
A
Yeah, I think think Marquez's life was messy. I have not read the. I assume there's a biography. I've not read this. But that even I know this suggests there's a lot more. That's just the tip of the iceberg here.
- [73:21]
B
Yeah, this is the story that made it public. Like, what else is out there?
- [73:26]
A
All right, let's do some hot takes. Rebecca, you go.
- [73:28]
B
Is this the horniest book in the modern canon?
- [73:35]
A
Well, you've got well considered the candidates here. I think you're thinking along the same lines.
- [73:42]
B
We've got little, which is horny and also problematic. You got A Sport and a Pastime, which is my favorite horny book in the modern game.
- [73:51]
A
Very horny.
- [73:53]
B
We'll do that on this show at some point and you will blush for the entire episode. Giovanni's Room.
- [74:02]
A
Those are all more Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs comes to mind. That is. There's a lot going on there. And if you know, you know and if you don't, you can find out.
- [74:11]
B
That's a blurb. There's a lot going on.
- [74:13]
A
There's a lot going on on there. I think in terms of number, volume and variety. You have to be correct about this.
- [74:20]
B
Yeah. There's maybe more like Lolita in A Sport, in a Pastime and Giovanni's Room are all more like horny on the page. Like there's more description.
- [74:29]
A
All fours. Can we put All Fours in the modern canon? It's pretty damn horny.
- [74:33]
B
All Fours is very horny.
- [74:35]
A
Is it in the canon is more of a question. I think it's maybe, but it's of modern books that a lot of people have read and taken seriously of literary fiction. It's certainly up there. Yeah.
- [74:44]
B
And there's. That's certainly.
- [74:45]
A
It's called All Four, for God's sake. Sake.
- [74:46]
B
Yeah, it's like it's very on the page and there's just a lot of doing it in 100 years of solitude.
- [74:54]
A
And superhuman sexual feats of, like, 70 dudes a day for multiple years to pay off your debt. I mean, tough stuff.
- [75:01]
B
I think I'm asking this question about is it the horniest? Because, like, often horniness comes across as interior, like fantasy and desire and the way that those things are described. And we don't get a lot of interiority. We don't get, like, the characters thinking about how. How much they want to bone each other and what they want to do. But we do just get it. Like, there. There's furniture breaking, sex that I was like, is this.
- [75:23]
A
We get it and so do others.
- [75:25]
B
Everybody's getting it every.
- [75:28]
A
Every which way. I. I think it's what we. We will struggle to. To talk about a hornier book. I will certainly struggle to talk about a hornier book than this.
- [75:37]
B
Definitely in the Horny Book hall of Fame.
- [75:39]
A
Yeah, certainly. Speaking of hall of fame, hall of fame fames. I think this is one of the best opening lines in literary history. And. And maybe if pressed, I think it might be the best.
- [75:50]
B
Bold claims.
- [75:51]
A
Just so many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Arellano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. And in microcosm, it does that thing we were talking about. There's a lot. There's a lot. And you're not sure how it holds, but then it literally here, in this case, crystallizes into this one evocative, singular image. It's a great line, and it's amazing. It's really cool.
- [76:18]
B
A different book would end at the firing squad and why he is thinking about ice.
- [76:25]
A
Yeah. Whenever someone asked me about great opening lines, there's things that people remember. You know, 124 was angry, especially spiteful. Spiteful. Pardon me, I'm doing a translation. You know, it was a true. It's a truth universally acknowledged that young men with a good fortune are in want of a wife. That's Pride and Prejudice. Call me Ishmael.
- [76:47]
B
I think it's a cold, bright day in April and the clocks are striking 13.
- [76:50]
A
Yeah. Sing to me amuse of many, the.
- [76:53]
B
Man of many turns.
- [76:55]
A
Or sing to a muse of the rage of Peleus's son, the great Achilles. But I think it's a. I think opening lot. Great opening lines are a shorter list than people think. Maybe that's my real hot take. I don't think as many as people think about great opening lines, we get to five and we're kind of out.
- [77:12]
B
And like this is by Toni Morrison. Like 1 2, 4 was spiteful quiet as it's kept. They shoot the white girl first. Like it's.
- [77:21]
A
But that's a different. Maybe we could do that some other time. But like it's. It's singularly evocative and it stands on its own as you know, in miniature version of what Marquez is doing.
- [77:32]
B
Yeah. And that as I said earlier, like there's no payoff for it. And it's fine that there's no payoff for it. It's fine.
- [77:37]
A
There's no payoff for it.
- [77:38]
B
It's not a real ball like that real God level stuff.
- [77:41]
A
Yeah. Further reading recommendations Rebecca, you've got some and I've got some.
- [77:45]
B
If you're interested in more of the mechanics of it, you can go listen to our book Riot podcast episode called what is magical Realism? We've name dropped Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie several times in this episode. That's clearly a child of 100 Years of Solitude and a build upon. In some ways I think that's worth a look. Like Water for Chocolate and House of the Spirits are both wonderful, more contemporary works of magical realism. Those are mine.
- [78:10]
A
Yeah. I have Go for Love and Time with Cholera to. I mean this sort of obvious but to follow is more Marquez. I may even start there, honestly, if pressed. Blindness by Jose Armago who is also. It's also. It's a version of magical realism. This is the plague talk reminded me of it. But the plague here is a blindness. And much like in Marquez, there's not like a moral that's easy. It's more elemental. It's more fable like it's easier to read. It's quite a bit shorter, but I think it's trafficking in some of the same things that Marques is doing. But pared down quite a bit, it's pretty good. Cocktail party crib sheet three to five takeaways. Rebecca, what do you have?
- [78:53]
B
I mean you start with magical realism. Is the supernatural as the mundane or you know, things that couldn't happen happen and the characters are fine with it. When you're talking about the book specifically like the titular solitude is existential Macondo and is more exposed to the outside world and more foreigners arrive and the buendias feel more isolated. So like this, it's this one family as microcosm of what's happening to the erosion of solitude as a thing you can get in the modern world and the erosion of one town's ability to really Be by itself or to be isolated. Like no one can be isolated anymore. And Marquez is really writing into that space.
- [79:33]
A
Mine is. I mentioned a little bit before, but I think the fact that this has sold 50 million copies and has become an internationally beloved novel is truly shocking given the difficulty and of getting through it. The at times incomprehensibility, the complexity. I kind of can't believe it. This is not something that you would pick. This is not something that the AI algorithms would have put into their data sets and shot out. I think it's wonderful.
- [80:01]
B
50 million have been reading. Read.
- [80:04]
A
I think. Is this the most abandoned book of all time? Is an interesting question.
- [80:12]
B
Unanswerable, but Unanswerable.
- [80:15]
A
Yeah. Final beat. This is our zero to well read score. Each one of our five categories gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Our five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read, cred, and O damn factor. Historical importance is very high. Rebecca, I would say you gotta.
- [80:34]
B
I think this is a nine or ten.
- [80:35]
A
Nine or ten? Yeah. I think a nine only because it's not 2,000 years old. I mean, seriously, it's not one of those. Readability, on the other hand, quite low. I would say two. What did we give? I mean, is it the most difficult book we've tackled thus far? Is it more difficult than Mite's Children or Violence?
- [80:56]
B
I found Midnight's Children to be more difficult. This actually found felt light to me coming off of Midnight. Or lighter. It's not light, but lighter.
- [81:02]
A
I mean Midnight Children is longer. It's quite a bit longer, which matters. I don't remember what we gave that, but it feels like a 3. Readability, current relevance of central questions. I mean, 1 and 10 to call.
- [81:17]
B
It a 5, which doesn't. None of them. None of it feels right. I think 1 and 10 is the most.
- [81:24]
A
1 and 10.
- [81:26]
B
That's the most Marquez way to answer it. Let's leave it there. 1 and 10.
- [81:30]
A
Book nerd read credit. I think this is quite high.
- [81:33]
B
I do too. If you finished it.
- [81:36]
A
If you finished it and gave it a. If you really did and you gave it a serious go and made it to the end, I am awarding you an eight and a half.
- [81:44]
B
Okay, I agree it's not Ulysses. Eight and a half.
- [81:47]
A
It's not Ulysses, but Ulysses is a 10. History of the Peloponnesian War all the way through is a 10.
- [81:54]
B
I had to read that my freshman year in college. And I'm still.
- [81:57]
A
Then you get a 10. I hope you liked it. Oh damn. Factor nine.
- [82:04]
B
Yeah it's a nine. It's high. One of the higher scoring. This makes sense. This is a huge problem.
- [82:12]
A
Is there? Well you know what we're going to do a little more question and wondering for those of you on the Patreon level for the bonus content. I've got some more questions for Rebecca but we're going to leave that there. Our show notes are@bookriot.com listen you can shoot us an email at zero to well read bookriot.com if you email us I will email you back. And I probably will also have in our email signature saying hey go rate and review us on Apple because you know what you should. That would be super great of you.
- [82:40]
B
Five stars.
- [82:41]
A
Five stars. Zero to well read is a proud member of the Airwave podcast network. Rebecca, thank you so much.
- [82:49]
B
Always a great time. This was a fun one.