I have read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His short novels make for great reading. The man, unlike many other novelists, does not suffer from verbal diarrhea and possesses humor of a very distinct kind. While a college youngling, green and fresh off the plantation (and I mean that literally…for 15 years, the only neighbors I knew were rice fields and the occasional goat. But let’s not trail from the point.), I picked up one of his more famous novels A Hundred Years of Solitude in an attempt to fit into the “intellectual” horde I found myself associated with. Not to say that I’ve never read anything before that. I read a lot of books growing up. What else can a teenager do when there is no phone, no cable TV and anything remotely interesting is a 45-minute bus ride away? You hole up in your room and read.
But this was unlike any of the books I have encountered. A Hundred Years of Solitude, I’m sorry to say, will be the one thing I will never muster enough will power for. It remains the great lost cause of my literary ventures. The fish that got away…Nay! The fish I chucked back into the river with blunt force! And this is not to offend any of you who actually finished it and even at that point are certain you will not find yourself waking up from a coma 15 years into the future where everybody’s wearing aluminum jump suits and own space-warping vehicles.I tried and I went as far as the fifth page. But it didn’t go as smoothly as that. After a few paragraphs, you will notice that there are several characters in play whose interwoven lives make it complicated enough trying to figure out which one’s the father, grandfather, son, great grandson, cousin, next-door neighbor, etc. And as if to make a deep, well-calculated lunge for your sanity, Garcia Marquez names them all Jose. You put the book down to go to the bathroom or get a soda from the fridge, you try to pick up where you left off and after about five minutes of mulling over which Jose the narrator is talking about, you decide to start again. I repeated this tedious cycle three times and on the fourth attempt I got the urge (and justifiably so) to fling the damn thing out the window while howling Indian war hoots.
I was once again “zinged”, a term I use for every event in my life that jolted me into facing a reality. This was precisely the moment I learned one of the philosophies I stand by to this day: never take anyone’s opinion as fact. We are all uniquely structured and would thus have varied ways of seeing the world. If for instance someone tells me, wag kang kumain dyan, hindi masarap, I go and try it myself. Your opinion is not my opinion.
And my opinion of that book is this: All the great ones have their flaws. Garcia Marquez probably got so caught up in the storyline, he forgot to take a step back and see that he has whipped up Calculus (for the benefit of those who don’t know this about me, let me state this once and for all, I loathe Math!). For that I will never find out how it ends or what it was really about, not in this life or any of the other lives I will have in the vast karmic wheel of soul-recycling (that is assuming reincarnation is true and even so, who’s to say I won’t be an ant or a bird in my next life).
So it was and each time I walk by it in a bookstore, I let out a self-deprecating chuckle. How easy was it to pull me into a fad back when I was 17? Still, it was a healthy albeit futile attempt as it has taught me that despite having been read by many a brain, you will not always like the book. If you think otherwise, then so be it. My opinion is not yours.
