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OT but tangential any magical realism authors to read? So far, I got Marquez, Jorge Louis Borges and Murakami. And preferably recommendation should be good to provide philosophical consolation to a code monkey worker-bee in the capitalist society.
You may like Rudulfo Anaya, or Isabel Allende. Also, Salman Rushdie.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree, but upvoted. Magical realism in general and Garcia Marquez in particular are more critically problematic than many realize. I don't think this thread should gloss over that entirely, even if the tone of objection is unlovely.
Nah, you're both wrong, and what's worse, you're holding strawmans. Not the time and place for this, my dudes.
“Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice." Best opening line of a book ever. RIP.
Oh my. A paragon of magical realism and my second favorite author. Rest in peace. Liking storytelling alone is sometimes not enough to like Marquez, you have to love language too. He uses (some might say abuses) language to impact his storytelling, often using incredibly long, convoluted sentences to weave his narrative. It can be hard to follow, sometimes intentionally, but I find it enormously satisfying to read an…
I, on the other hand, hope that the three men that Marquez's close friend Castro had executed for trying to get to the US on a boat will rest in peace. Not to mention all the dissidents who died in his prisons.
Marquez lived in Cuba and for decades witnessed the daily suffering and poverty of the Cuban people. The endless monitoring of Castro's secret police. The constant rationing of basic necessities (though not for Castro or Marquez, who lived lives of luxury).
He was a master of writing about the lives of the people of Latin America. But he walked the streets of Havana, saw what anyone could see, and never wrote about any of that. Perhaps he was too busy sharing a fine repast with Fidel and Raul to get around to it.
“Many years later, in front of the firing squad, colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon his father took him to see ice." Best opening line of a book ever. RIP.
And a very powerful end too: He [Aureliano II ] had already understood that he would never leave that room, for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because…
Can someone provide a quick summary of what was it that made Marquez so prominent? I had not know much about him at all. FYI, if like me, you have trouble accessing the article, and using Chrome, right-click and open in an incognito window.
Marquez thumbed the eye of colonialism. And he wrote a bunch of rolling sentences with colourful imagery. But I don't see why he deserves the Nobel Prize over, to take a glaring example, Borges.
Except that Borges didn't really write anything politically fashionable, as opposed to possessing any other literary virtue.
So. Politics.
This is one of the reasons I keep reading Hacker News. It's a great source for cutting-edge tech news; more importantly, it's also a great source for important news.
I think I should go to bed.
OT but tangential any magical realism authors to read? So far, I got Marquez, Jorge Louis Borges and Murakami. And preferably recommendation should be good to provide philosophical consolation to a code monkey worker-bee in the capitalist society.
Can someone provide a quick summary of what was it that made Marquez so prominent? I had not know much about him at all. FYI, if like me, you have trouble accessing the article, and using Chrome, right-click and open in an incognito window.
I think he was, in no small part, popular for the same reason that Sean Penn got his second Oscar for Milk : politics. Marquez thumbed the eye of colonialism. And he wrote a bunch of rolling sentences with colourful imagery. But I don't see why he deserves the Nobel Prize over, to take a glaring example, Borges. Except that Borges didn't really write anything politically fashionable, as opposed to possessing any othe…