One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

Has a book ever changed your life? People think I am crazy when I say this!

Well, I had  read this book the first time 15 years ago and I felt like I was not the same afterwards.
And this is exactly why I couldn't read it again for so long: I was scared to change the "memories", to overcome the feelings...how wrong I was!

Macondo, the imaginary place where the book is set, is a magic place, where feelings and emotions do not have boundaries, where everything is exaggerated in one sense or in the other. A place where love, guilt and passion are faces of the same coins.
No, I am not gonna tell you what is the book about, this you could easily find everywhere, I will just tell you to go to Macondo and try to stay there the longest you can, its loneliness will fill your days, the smell of banana trees will be with you for long, you will look at chestnut trees with sorrow and joy.
Macondo is the place where your emotions will sit under the shadow of a tree, while waiting for the next train, or the next plane to catch, but will you really dare and want to get it?

Remembering Márquez 

(Aracataca, 6 marzo 1927 – Città del Messico, 17 aprile 2014)

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

He is gone, his books are not, there is no better way to remember him than through his books. So here it is my second reading of this masterpiece. A slow, emotional, touching one...

Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza fall secretly in love during their youth, a love made of letters, flowers, poems, a love at first sight that grew with time. But when a rich doctor (Dr. Juvenal Urbino) comes into the picture, this passionate love is forced to be put on hold, for more than 50 years...
And those 50 years you feel them all, coz the reading is for some sort of magic extended in time. I felt the last 100 pages lasted forever, every time I thought I was about to finish the book, still some pages where there to be read. And I think this is what can make you love or hate this book. Yes, this, along with the fact that nobody wishes to have to wait 50 years to embrace their love, coz you wish nobody sane would allow himself to such suffering for so long. But Florentino does, and I didn't feel for one single page to tell him to do otherwise.
As for every Márquez book, the engagement of different senses is the key, the first time Fermina and Dr. Juvenal Urbino make love are one of the most intense pages I have ever read on the topic, without rhetoric or explicit sexuality.

“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”

p.s. maybe one day I should convince myself to watch the movie adpted from the book, or maybe not...

If you follow a bit thig blog you'd know how hard is for me to share this news: Gabriel García Márquez is no more.
I grew up with him, I started to truly love books thank to him. There is a deep bond with me, his books, my family and lots of people I love.

Thanks Márquez, for all you gave us...

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez

People often ask me who is my favourite writer. As for music, sometimes it is difficult to answer 'cause I like whatever makes me feel something,  famous or not it makes no difference. But yes, when they ask me this question at the end I always answer: one is for sure Márquez (the other is more recent and you will discover soon I am sure). It is a old love, started many years ago and never weakened. All started by reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I was quite young and lots of people thought the book was boring, long: I simply loved it. Since then, once in a while I read another book from him. I don't like to read books of the same authors in a short period of time, I like to take a break from them, sometimes also long, in order to enjoy better the reading. This year was the time for News of a Kidnapping. If you ever read something by Márquez you will know all his writings are magic, they bring you in another world. This one is different 'cause it is a true story. It describe the kidnapping of ten leading people in Colombia by one of the "most important" drug trafficker in the world: Pablo Escobar.  It is a kind of written documentary; but I must say, evendo this book is surely different from the others, you can still catch the touching style of Márquez. The way he brings you into the story making you imagine all the characters, the situations, the emotions, it is typical of him. I always tell everybody that the only way to read him is with all your senses, and this book is no different. You could smell the dirty in the rooms, hear the whispering, see the darkness. Toward the end I felt like I knew a little Pablo Escobar, and I could enter into his mind.

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

Gabriel García Márquez

 p.s. It is a case, but not completely, that I finished the book today in the metro, as today is Márquez's birthday and I am happy I could "celebrate" with him by reading his book.