Sunday, March 15, 2009
week three!
Personally, I'm getting along very well with this book, despite previous posts/comments where I have insisted on its puzzling nature. Marquez's poetic long sentences are usually chock full of figurative language. Sometimes, though, I find it hard to distinguish metaphors from his fantasical world. So far one of my favorite sentences is "The new house, white, like a dove, was inaugurated with dance." The house is personified, and Marquez uses a peculiar verb, inaugurated, to demonstrate the house's sort of "dance". The sentence is very simple really, and pretty far ahead in the book (only page 59) but I have remembered it through out the story. In some books it seems like the author has to think about their similies and metaphors, and they seem forced and not connected. But with Marquez, it seems as though he slips them in and the sentence works quite well with them.
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Marquez, as I've said before, reminds me slightly of Cormac McCarthy in his long winded sentences and lack of identified pronouns. But the similarity ends there, when McCarthy dives off into lack of punctation and Marquez creates wild fantasies.
ReplyDeleteThat is a good point, what you said about confusing metaphors with the mystical town of Macondo. It can be blurry, at times, whether something is a metaphor, or actually happening. Just because something couldn't be happening in our lives certainly doesn't mean it couldn't occur in Macondo.
ReplyDeleteI like the sentence you picked out, it's rather beautiful.
Another similarity between the two authors would be that they tend to refer to characters by full names, such as John Grady Cole (never John) and Jose Arcadio Buendia (never Jose).
ReplyDeleteBut still, their styles, subjects, and tendencies are quite different.