Solitude

I was fifteen when I was gifted with Solitude. My brother Leslie came home on vacation from Mexico and brought me the Garcia Marquez book I would love for the rest of my life…

There was no better gift for this solitary adolescent languishing in Port-au-Prince. I would not rest until I gifted it in turn to everyone I loved. Have you read a Hundred Years would be a continuous greeting until he wrote other novels and I was assured all my friends had read it. I would buy used copies of the book because I could not bear to see them ignored on the bookstore shelves. I read everything else he wrote and appreciated each book but Solitude is the one who nourished my soul. (Aureliano was the name my son would have inherited, I loved the hero so)
“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.” said Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In his 86th year this month, I believe he is celebrating in his private and secret world but publicly, I declare my love eternal and gratitude for the world he opened up for me like one parts open an orange in offering. Felicidades Gabo! Con mucho cariño, te digo que te quiero. And Leslie, I carry you in my heart and bless you for this offering.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point….”
  • solitude2
    “Believed by many to be one of the world’s greatest writers, Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian-born author and journalist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and a pioneer of the Latin American “Boom.” Affectionately known as “Gabo” to millions of readers, he first won international fame with his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, a defining classic of twentieth century literature. Whether writing short stories, epic novels, or nonfiction, Gabo is above all a brilliant storyteller, and his writing is a tribute to both the power of the imagination and the mysteries of the human heart. In Gabo’s world, where flowers rain from the sky and dictators sell the very ocean, reality is subject to emotional truths as well as physical boundaries. It is a world of great beauty and great cruelty; a world where love brings both redemption and enslavement; and a world where the lines between objective reality and dreams are hopelessly blurred. It is a world very much like our own.”  (http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/)

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 23rd, 2013 at 10:00 pm. It is filed under reviews and tagged with , , , , , , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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