I once told my Cuban teacher at the Instituto Cervantes I wanted to master la lengua Española because I mean to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien Años de Soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) in the original Español.
I casually mentioned this to Jun and what do you know, he got a me a commemorative copy of this book when he went to Arizona, published by the Real Academia Española and the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (which includes our very own Academia Filipina de la Lengua Española). He also got me a Penguin edition of El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera), which I found too expensive at National Bookstore.
The first time I read this book (translated into English by Gregory Rabassa) was way back in college and I remember being unable to put it down. Almost like a magical tale, it struck me as a fantastic allegory of the human condition. Gabriel Garcia Marquez may have woven an entirely different world of his own, mostly defying the laws of physics, but he didn't even need to appeal to his readers to suspend their disbelief, we willingly obliged him, unconsciously drawn to his magical world. And what is most appealing about this book is that it is all too real and universal- the rise and fall of the Buendia family and the place that is Macondo are very much our own.
This is a hugely popular book first published in 1967 in Argentina and I'm sure a lot of you have read this at some point. Suffice it to say that this book earned for the author the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
No comments:
Post a Comment