Nicholas Notes

Reading Marquez over this reading holiday was a treat compared to previous literature we've been assigned. I’m not thorough with it just yet, but have enjoyed reflecting on the writing, and seeing what others have to say about the themes and style of the book. I have spoiled the text a little bit for myself, and have a general idea of what comes out of the longer and more repetitive lifespan read halfway through the book, and can see why its reviewed as a piece of literature equally symbolic as a religious text.  I would like to take the first week of One Hundred Years Of Solitude to appreciate and discuss the ideas of time, seemingly cyclical and never-ending, as well as the beings that get to experience it (ie. us readers as well as the characters inside the story). The story kicks off recounting Jose’s fascination with gypsy technology, and seems never to learn the cycle he falls into. Little do we know, that is only a glimpse at what Marquez has in store for us. Firstly, I don’...

Ghosts were everywhere in the town of this tale. When thinking of a ghost, my brain imagines a cartoon person who’s transparent, visibly supernatural, and floats through walls - haunting different rooms. There are some similarities here to this concept of ghosts, in that they are haunting the living people of Comala - trapping echoes and striking fear in others. The style of the text flows through different character perspectives - just like my ghosts float through the walls of a haunted house. Nonetheless, what is different is that these souls of passed characters are not obvious (at least, to me). This is confusing, as we’ll hear the impressions of dead people, or even be led to believe that a character (for example, Abundio) is real and living, taking part in the story - until it is revealed that “It couldn’t have been him…. Abundio has already died”!  Rulfo recounts in his passage that he too found difficulty keeping up with the wildness of the strange town. He offers us sympat...

Let me discuss a novel, but not just any novel. One whose narrator would “disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers -- very few readers -- to perceive an atrocious or banal reality…” (17). Labyrinths - as read by me - was a whirlwind of disorienting tales, told by a fantastical narrator who lived one thousand lives - and now recounts his adventures with a reflectively, philosophically, bitter taste. Unfortunately, I was not one of the ‘lucky few’ foreshadowed on page 17. At first, in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ I was reminded of the ‘Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy’ , whereby seemingly absurd phenomena are recounted as the mundane organization of lands far far away. It is explained: “ One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory” (23) or “These small, very h...