One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

23:20Jeff:I really like that idea. It is kind of episodic. Yes. And it feels like to read it, I read it over like five days. And that still felt like drinking from a fire hose. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And as I was reading, I noticed that what was happening was the chapters are like between 20 and 30 pages long. Which feels manageable on a tone. It's totally manageable. A chapter is totally manageable. And normally when I'm really enjoying a book, I will sit and just, you know, like you want to take down as much of it as you possibly can. But I noticed that I would read one 20-page chapter and then I would need to get up and take some space from it.

23:54Jeff:Even if it was like, I'm going to take five minutes and do the dishes or I'm going to take 10 and walk the dog around the block or something. Like, I just needed to sort of take a breath and almost like shake the Etch-A-Sketch in between each one. Because they do flow into each other. Like, usually the thing that happens at the end of a chapter is a setup for where you're going to open the next chapter. Not always, but most of the time. And they stand individually. Because the characters are basically impossible to track and the plot is beside the point, you could just do one chapter a day even.

24:31Jeff:I think this is the rare kind of book that really would lend itself to being broken up that way. Like one chapter a day for a couple of weeks and kind of dwell in that space and then be able to absorb what each of those individual vignettes is doing and grasp more of the imagery. because in a compressed period, like five days, or I don't know how long it took you, a couple of days to do it, the imagery, it has one effect of just sort of washing over you. I just felt like I lived inside one of those collages for a couple of days. Your head is just swimmy. And that's pleasant, but I do think that it would benefit from a more spacious time and reading experience.

25:17Yeah, and I don't want to say that. I guess I want, I think both reading experiences could exist side by side. I think they would offer different things because the more compressed reading experience that you and I did five or three days or whatever, you get the effect of the tsunami of experience and idea that Marquez is presenting. And I think that's an important part of what the book is. But I think there's behind around that could be another secondary encounter of slowness, of selecting pieces, you know, spending a moment with the clockwork, whatever. There's so many clockwork things. Steampunk Marquez.

25:56Or, you know, this particular line or this particular woman's story or this particular representation of clothing or food. There's just so much there that it does seem an exhaustible work in a lot of different ways. Let's go on to talk about Marquez a little bit, born in 1927 in Columbia, raised by his grandparents in his early years. And both of them were quite influential. His grandfather was actually a retired colonel, considered a hero and a storyteller, a raconteur, who himself was enthralled by the invention of ice making equipment. Because, you know, this would have been he would have been born in the mid 18th or excuse me, mid 19th century, where this is a real thing.

26:35And so I'll talk about later. I think this is one of the great opening lines in world history. But for all of Marquez's invention, the first line has a lot of realness in it, even as it's not true in the same kind of way. His grandmother apparently was a jokester and very matter of fact, and also she would embellish. And so there was in his early childhood a blending of what was true, what was there to make the story better or to elide or add on to what was actually going on.

27:06Jeff:Yeah, he talked about how her storytelling style really influenced his, that she had this deadpan where when his grandmother told stories, he could not distinguish between what was fact and what was fantasy in the stories. And that she could say the direct quote is the wildest things with a completely natural tone of voice. And that I mean, that's a very succinct description of what reading this book is like as well. Like the characters live inside a mix of fact and fantasy. Sometimes we don't know what's real and what is embellishment. And then later on, Marquez has like a sort of ground shifting reading experience with the metamorphosis by Franz Kafka that does the same thing for him.

27:52Jeff:where, oh, you can use this tone. Like he picks this tone up from his grandmother, but then he recognizes it in a work of fiction and it occurs to him, you can write this way. It's not just the way that his grandmother told stories, but you could write this way. And those two things are like the primary ingredients of the stew that create Marquez doing the work that he's doing here. If, I mean, this is maybe the easiest guess of an influential reading that you could possibly imagine, the metaphor. Like, having not even read Marquez's biography at all, and you said, okay, there was one particular reading experience that shaped him, I think Metamorphosis would have been my top five selections.

28:30Because, you know, Gregor Samsa woke one day to find himself transformed into a giant cot. That matter-of-factness, that strangeness, and then playing out the repercussions of that, like, that's all there. It feels like it could be a two-pager story or anecdote within the larger work here. worked as a journalist before writing nonfiction and turning to fiction. He was supposed to go to law school because that's what the folks wanted, slacked off and read books. Thank you. Welcome to the club's Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

28:59Jeff:This is becoming a through line in the backstories of authors on Zero to Well Read was supposed to be doing this other thing and instead hung around and read some books and became a great writer. Unanswerable question alert, Rebecca. How many people that barely scraped by and didn't slack off enough and went to law school would have been tremendous authors if they just had a little bit more of the loser in them? Unanswerable question. His debut novel was 1960, The Evil Hour. And it's one of these, like, you can see what's coming next a little bit, but you also can't see it at the same time. I'm trying to say, like, 100 Years of Solitude was an immediate hit in Spanish in 1967.

29:41Jeff:And it's his second novel. Second novel. And then he doesn't have a novel out again until 1985. Love in the Time of Cholera, but he wins the Nobel Prize in 1982. So like largely, almost entirely on the back of 100 Years of Solitude, like to win the Nobel Prize in literature with two novels out and only one of which, like that's how important and immediate of a phenomenon 100 Years of Solitude was, that less than 20 years later, you're winning the Nobel Prize for basically one book. Yeah. Even the writing of 100 Years of Solitude feels like it could be a story within it where he kind of has this idea, kind of an epiphany one day, sells the family car so that he can support he and his wife.

30:24He spends 18 months writing it, just writes constantly. And then every night would sort of have dinner with friends to talk about what he wrote that day, you know, the progress, the ideas, the characters. It feels like itself would make a wonderful one-act play, I have to say.

30:39Jeff:He's like going to the pawn shop to get money to get the postage to send the manuscript off. Yeah, a real bet on yourself move from Gabriel Garcia Marquette. He, again, immediately becomes a notable figure in world stage. I think one thing that's hard to understand now, especially for those of us who are not super well versed in Colombian history, is he becomes such a figure that he gets directly involved in matters of state, like treaty negotiations, peace talks, labor negotiations, and becomes a real voice for the left. I can't think of an equivalent in recent American history. Is there anyone even close to like this?

31:20No, I was thinking it would be like, I don't know, if they'd been consulting Toni Morrison on civil rights legislation. Yeah, which in a way would kind of make sense, but it just doesn't happen in this way. And Marquez has been called the greatest of all Colombians. Again, this is just one presidential address, but that someone may say that even erroneously shows you the titanic scale of his work. Let's see. Young Love, too. You want to say more about this? You put this in here. I saw this, but I didn't know if we wanted to talk about it. He's a romantic in his own way, but also not necessarily always faithful in a way we might understand.

32:01Jeff:Yeah. So Marquez first met his wife when they were both quite young. The reporting on it varies, kind of seems typical for how slippery a lot of the stories about his life are. But it seems to be like when either he was 12 or 13 and she was 9 or 10, they first met and like pledged eternal devotion to each other. He proposed when they were 18, and then they were married years later when he was in his early 30s and she was in her late 20s. But there's maybe some wandering around, some other women on the sea. I've got a great story to tell, speaking of wandering around here in a little bit. But let's move on to our most recent reading experience.

32:40Rebecca, when was the first time you read this book?

32:43Jeff:I read this in, I think, late high school or early college on my own, probably that faithful Barnes & Noble paperback favorites table, that I knew this book was a big deal. And I was trying to, you know, this was the point in my life where I was trying to answer those questions for myself. I wanted to be well read. It went so far over my head. I remember being aware that it was going over my head. Like, I didn't grok it, but I didn't know that that was okay. That, like, at least not grokking some of it is part of the experience. Like, the imagery and the dreamlike feeling of it stuck with me. I remembered that.

33:27Jeff:But at the time, I didn't know. Like, I hadn't read Rushdie. I had not read Pension. I didn't know about what magical realism was trying to do. So I just remember being like, wait, what's happening? Like, flowers are falling from the sky. It's a kind of imagination that I had never inhabited before. I read it once in the last decade, I think, just to follow up with it and see, can I make more sense of this as a more grown-up reader? Good news, you can. But that was my first experience. I think you had a similar first reading. We were both pretty young. I did, you know, independently reading in high school when I was trying to like broaden my reading to more world literature.

34:10And I think I found a list or I probably was just looking at Nobel Prize winners, honestly, and picking some and saw something that was available at my local borders RIP. And then I read Love in the Time of Cholera as well. I did them both back to back. And I remember and I haven't read either since. Oh. this. I remember much preferring Love in the Time of Cholera, probably because it was the characters stick around for more than a few pages. A little more straightforward. It's still quite beautiful. A little more straightforward. A wonderful book. Again, not at all like other kinds of reading, but felt to me a little more manageable.

34:45I was trying to remember how I felt about 100 Years of Solitude. I think the best characterization give is when I picked up the book for this reading, I thought it was 600 pages long. Yeah, I did too.

35:00Jeff:My copy is like 415 and I was ready for it to be significantly longer. So I can only imagine that that's sort of a vestigial memory that's calcified around the experience of like, it just goes on and on because I wasn't sure how to make sense of it. It just kept, it just keeps going. It just keeps, things just keep happening. And you're given no purchase really to stop or pause. What do you do when you've read for like four or eight or 12 or 25 pages and nothing quite adds up? Yeah, right. I don't know. You know what they say. Early Bird gets the ultimate 30A vacation rental. Wait, they don't say that?

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37:12process and it takes a second read. It is overwhelming. And that is not your deficiency, but a challenge put forth by the author of the text for you to encounter and think about different things than you're used to when you're trying to figure out who committed the murder, who's going to inherit the family fortune, or what's going to happen to the capital city or the kid or whatever. So I think those two combine where at this go, the text is the same. I am no smarter than I was then in terms of raw processing power, but I'm much more equipped like, okay, how do I think about my reaction to this?

37:48Take your reaction to this as being valid, and then try to figure that into a matrix of meaning that is beyond, I am understanding the plot at this point. And I think that's super valuable. We're kind of all over the... We always are doing some foreshadowing of what it's about and what it's like to read this, Rebecca, but Let's talk about some of the bigger ideas or the small ideas within the big reading experience here. Where do you want to go next?

38:14Jeff:I mean, I'm talking more just about what it felt like to go back into the world of this book. It feels to me to pull from art like you're inside a Dali painting a lot of the time. Like you can't keep track of who is who. It's on purpose. Like the repetitive naming the first time I read this was like, wait, how the hell am I supposed to remember which Aureliano has done what? But this time around, it was like, okay, that's on purpose. He's shaking things up. He's confusing on purpose. So let that go and acknowledge major moments are going to be buried inside these dense, fantastical scenes. But you want to keep reading.

38:53Jeff:It has its own gravitational pull. And in the same way that it's kind of enchanting to stand in front of a Dali painting and be like, why would the clock be melting? But if you can free yourself from why and just be like the clock is melting, like it's obviously this is what's happening. This is the world that we live in. The clock is melting. It can really cast a powerful spell, which feels on the nose to me to say about this book. But is the truest thing to my experience. It's about what it is to live inside of life that feels confusing and also beautiful and confounding and repetitive and exciting and sexy.

39:39Jeff:There's so much tossed into it. This is a kitchen sink novel. The whole of human experience is just tossed in. And to just let it happen is, I think, the best thing you can do. I think, I'm not sure if this is, I'm not sure if the academic powers that be would sanctify this reading, but I think of magical realism as a subset, a particular manifestation of surrealism with its own history and strategy. But I did find myself like you thinking about surrealism. And then I got to think about the etymology of surrealism. Like, sir, that Latin prefix means beyond, above, and around, right? Not in place of, but in addition to the real world.

40:22And I found that very helpful to think about. I really like that. These elements, these supernatural, magical moments are not replacements for, but enrichers of, in addition to the real world. And I thought that was a helpful way for me to understand it. I think another thing that surrealism does and magical realism does, and it certainly happens in this, is it not only puts supernatural elements into the everyday, it also flattens the relationship of the everyday and the supernatural. so that everyday things that are amazing can be seen as amazing and maybe even more amazing than the supernatural.

41:01And again, the great example of this in this book is ice, right? Which, you know, Paul Thoreau wrote basically a whole book of the Mosquito Coast about how wild it would be to introduce ice to someone who'd never seen it in the middle of a rainforest, right? Because it does feel like magic. It feels like, what is this subject? It should not be here. The ability to put things where they should not be is a technological advancement. and it is its own sort of twin of magical realism of something where it should not be. So these supernatural elements in the everyday, I think by contrast, also show that there are quote unquote real things that should not be here, right?

41:39That are not welcome, that are not helpful, that are not part of what we do, whether that's the train or a machine gun or ice, which is here called the greatest invention in the world that's going to change everything. It's not that ice itself is going to change everything, but the ability to do things like bring something from a completely different climate and keep it here is its own kind of magic. It has its own kinds of consequences of import that we are so familiar with already. We don't quite see the transformative potential of ice because we've seen it all our lives. So that's, I think, something that's going on here as well.

42:12Jeff:Yeah, and that technology and things we perceive as progress are double-edged swords. If not like quintuple edged swords that there is, you know, the appeal of like you get exposure to the outside world. So you get science and you get more knowledge and you get exposure to art. But you also get war and the death of culture and the loss of natural beauty at the hands of industrialization. industrialization. With power comes corruption. With an avalanche of foreigners that Marquez describes comes beauty and new people in the town, but also this banana company that ruins everything. And we can't talk about the particulars of this book or the origins of magical realism without talking about how it is explicitly political.

42:58Jeff:Even if the book doesn't read as a polemic about any one political moment, Marquez is overtly critical of white explorers, of colonialism. He's overtly critical of the idea of war. At one point, one of the characters is like, wait, so are we just fighting about power itself? Yes. It's like on the page. It was so striking to read that and being, there is no subterfuge or sleight of hand. It's just about power. And they kind of agree. And it's a moment of reckoning even for the combatants, right? Some people even peel off and say, wait, I don't want to be a part of this. And some people are like, well, yeah, that's just what it is.

43:32Let's go.

43:33Jeff:Yeah. And there's a passage where some character's grandfather is telling him about how politics works. And he describes what the conservatives are about and what the liberals are about. And I thought, wow, we've been doing this forever and we're going to keep on doing it. But those definitions are so durable. And that like seven generations of men in this book go off to fight different wars for the same ideas. Like really how repetitive and futile and absurd it all is comes. That's like one of the primary functions of repeating it so much is to show like how futile all of this feels. Yeah. And that history and culture and time is circular.

44:13Things keep happening and happening and happening. And then technological, political, scientific progress don't really change these underlying dynamics. People are still people, even if they can have refrigerators. And that can be distracting from the march of time and quote-unquote progress measured scientifically or technologically may or may not have anything to do with underlying human progress or advancement and usually doesn't and usually exacerbates underlying dynamics rather than alter them in a fundamental way. I was thinking about how it's so much to absorb. And one thing that Marquez is trying to do is locate a specific town and person within the larger history.

45:00And the book is a small infinity within this larger infinity of Colombian history, which is a smaller infinity itself than of Latin American history, which is a smaller infinity. It keeps going and going and going.

45:14Jeff:There's kind of a Mobius strip quality to it. There's an element to it. And I remember, I don't know if it was Richard Feynman or someone said, you know, some infinities are bigger than others. That idea completely blew my mind, right? But I like this idea of like these nesting worlds of possibility. And he wants to tackle the small and the big. And this is an attempt, this is an artistic attempt to do that, to go from the very, very small specific to tackle huge waves, cycles, eras and epochs of human history and understanding. is really something else to watch here. Proposed against the kinds of understandings that are present, there are different kinds of ways of being, elemental sort of natural magic, artistic understanding, performative, even sexual ability understanding is presented as its own kind of epistemological world.

46:09But opposed to all of that, the technological, the scientific, the curious, the explorer in a good way, not sort of the conquering way, is the authority of the military and authoritarian logic. That is the nothing, to quote the never-ending story. That is which destroys everything else. It does not care about other modes of thinking and being. It does not see them. It does not interest it in preserving or even acknowledging their existence. And I'll give you one quote here. Father Nicanor, which is one of the local priests, Father Nicanor tried to impress the military authorities with the miracle of levitation and had his head split open by the butt of the soldier's rifle.

46:47So even in the face of a miracle, military and authoritarian logic does not care. It has its own ends, which is to control, dominate, and seek power. And I think that's an underlying theme you can follow throughout the book as well.

47:00Jeff:Yeah. Even for the people fighting on the side, ostensibly, of progress, like the Bowendia colonels are all liberals and they are fighting for what they believe is a mode of progress, more freedom for people, all of kind of the same underlying values that we think of as being liberal and progressive today. But there is a point where I think it's the grandmother of the family tells one of those seven generations of men, like, you have spent so much time around these people you're fighting and so much time thinking about them that you have become like them. And I had to like, did Gabriel Garcia Marquez invent horseshoe theory?

47:40He might have. I mean, it comes at one point where the difference between the left and the right is dependent on what color you can paint your house. Right. This one regime will let you paint it blue and the other won't. And that is sort of given us to be the complete and total difference in their thinking. And Marquez, again, he's not a they're all the same kind of a guy. But I think he is more along the lines of an Orwell, which is if you get to a certain point on either the left or the right that's about domination and totality without the express written consent to dissent, tolerate or diverge, you kind of come up in the same place anyway.

48:17It's about who gets one side wants to be red and one side wants to be blue and everything else is about power.

48:22Jeff:Yeah, that like forced obedience to any value system, even if it's the quote, like right or better or more honorable value system is still a problem. It's time for our straight thoughts, Rebecca. We've got a lot of them today. Where would you like to begin? It seems right that a book like this lends itself to a lot of straight thoughts. Like the Bible. Just pick chapter and verse. We could probably play a game where we sort of do a random.org for a page and line number and spend 20 minutes talking about whatever it comes up with. Absolutely. You could totally do that. I could not stop thinking about what an intimidating translation task this must be.

48:58Jeff:What are you feeling on the day that you get the phone call saying, will you do a translation of 100 Years of Solitude? Clear your calendar. Yeah. And for like how long? I looked around and I couldn't find like an essay or a good interview with a translator of this. I would love to come across one. And I spent a lot of time thinking about that. The other thing I spent a lot of time thinking about is would Garcia Marquez still get the Nobel for a book like this today that has so much incest? People are sleeping with their sisters. People are sleeping with their moms. People are sleeping with their mom who knows that she's their mom, but they don't know that she's their mom.

49:39Jeff:And then also, like, we would call it pedophilia today, like men, like being attracted to little girls and then honorably just waiting until the little girl has her first period at the age of, what, 12 to get married. And it's just taken as read inside the world of the book. I feel like Marquez gets a pass on it because everything else in this book is so fantastical and strange. But, like, it's not historical accuracy. It was not common in 1920 for men to be marrying 12-year-olds. There's something going on here. And I really wondered, like, there's a lot less written about this than I expected.

50:21Jeff:I went Googling to see, like, are we having renewed commentary about what happens to young girls in this book? Kind of surprised that we haven't had more of it. But I really wondered, can you win the Nobel today with a book that does this? I think that's a good question. I mean, all books are a product of their time. And even 1982 is far, maybe even farther away from us today than 1982 was from 1927 when Marquez was born sort of politically as sort of sexual politics. But I think you're absolutely right. There would be a different kind of understanding. And I think the book just gets written differently with a more modern understanding.

50:55It's like saying, would the book even exist like this if Marquez woke up today? He was born today and sort of read the Metamorphosis today. I think it can't be the case. And that's true with all books.

51:33That's true. profane and the sacred and between the illicit and the allowed. At the same time, I think it's happening that I think it's quite uncomfortable to read a lot of those points. I see why it's happening, but it is a real thing that a modern reader definitely is going to notice probably differently than readers were noticing in 1968.

51:52Jeff:Yeah. I just wondered so much about it. And like some of the scenes imply maybe a little judgment or a little understanding that it's grotesque, like when that character, that the guy is waiting for her to hit puberty when she gets her first period. She runs out into the living room to show her underwear to other women that are seated there. And she comes across as like, it's just such a little girl. Yes. Not knowing what's happening and behaving the way a little girl behaves. And then this man takes her and they go get married. And I paused there on, I think that Marquez knew that what he was doing in this scene is grotesque, But it is so uncriticized throughout the book.

52:39Jeff:And then he wins a Nobel for doing it. We're usually giving the thesis here of try to get outside of your 2025 reader's lens. But it seems astonishing even for 1982 to be accepting of that. Yeah, I don't think we need historical fiction. I think that idea of lens, like, I don't think we can get outside of it, but notice there are multiple lens you can use to look at things. Like, you can switch them out, like when you're at the optometrist, like one or two, two or three. Like, use your different lenses. See, I mean, I think one thing we both believe is you can, it's both and not one versus the other.

53:14And I think using your own, I don't think you want either the text to blow away your own critical sensibilities, nor can we nor is it as interesting to say yes and this is happening and this is something we can understand but also take the book um as an object of inquiry in its own time so i'd encourage people to use both sensibilities and one of our sensibilities definitely is gonna be like whoa

53:38Jeff:whoa that is really something yeah one of my margin notes is just yikes yikes yeah and you know similarly like there's there is the knowledge within the characters that incest will lead to sort of genetic problems, right? Like the kid's going to be born with a pigtail and someone eventually is. And then that character says, I would have armadillos if it meant to be, I got to be with you. So it's like playing with this idea of what is socially acceptable and it's not acceptable just because of society versus what's actually wrong. And sometimes I think it's over the line, even from social acceptability is not always the right arbiter of how people should be in the world.

54:16Jeff:Notably, both characters are full-grown adults. in that conversation about I would have armadillos if it meant I could be with you. Let's see, what do I have here? Could Marquez himself keep all these characters straight? If you went through it with a corkboard and yarn, does it connect and hold, and does it matter? I don't think it matters. I don't think it does either. Would it be, if you got the answers, like, you know, actually Marquez had an Excel doc or, you know, whatever it was that he had, you know, quill and board or a bunch of little pieces of paper. Yeah, that's one. What else do you have on your straight thoughts?

54:50Jeff:I could not stop thinking about the Odyssey. There is so much of the Odyssey in this, and it feels intentional to me. Like, there are ways to just pick up things that feel like the Odyssey that might not be intentional in other works of fiction, because it's, I think, just in that collective unconscious. But they tie an old man to a tree, and it gives real Odysseus tied to the prow of the ship to me. But really, the Odyssey thing that happens here over and over are references to weaving and unweaving. A character is weaving a shroud during the day and unweaving it at night. But also like one of the Aurelianos is making and then unmaking these small gold fishes.

55:28Jeff:He makes them and then he melts them down and then he starts over. And that's just one of the cycles in the book. And then I think on a meta level, that's what Marquez does in the book. That he's got this depiction of the making and the unmaking of this town and how the people wove this culture. and then it was destroyed and they unweave it. The people themselves are unmade by the end. Like for a long time, nobody dies. And then once the outside world starts creeping in, people start dying and they are literally unmade. A lot of this feels like just a Homeric homage to me in a way that was like kind of surprising.

56:05Jeff:And at first I was like, is he doing Homer here? But then once we got to weaving a shroud and unweaving it at night, like it's hard to, it's hard to miss that one. It's so hard to know because when you're dealing with elemental things, you're necessarily going to connect with other works of art that deal with elemental things. Right. So I could believe both. I think this idea of Macondo as maybe a kind of Troy that bridges the mythic and the real is super interesting to me. That one thing that Marques is trying to do is, you know, we were talking about this in the context of Oedipus, right? Like, Oedipus is clearly fictive.

56:43Like, everyone who was watching Oedipus knew that Sophocles wrote it. And yet, it was also participating in the mythopoetry of the day and extant myths. So, sort of both, which is way different than reading, I don't know, any sort of modern novel, where there's no, there's really no sense that it's maybe sacred and true, right? I mean, Marquez is super interested, I think, in how we got from then to now. And part of that is not just the reality of it, but our own imagination of it. And that's certainly the world of Homer. It's actually a little bit more the world of Herodotus, but that's a different podcast that we can get into some other time.

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58:50Ends March 24th. After three months, plan auto renews at$12.99 a month. Terms apply. I also was interested in the little goldfishes. For me, it appears a bunch of times. And every time it's in the context of someone wanting to get back to what they really want to do. being left alone to make your little goldfishes and do it in peace forever, right? And whenever someone's like, I'm going to abandon this military campaign or this business venture or this unrequited love, I'm just going to go make little goldfishes. I'm going to give someone little goldfishes. And it seemed to be just sort of a talisman of the real human interest in being left alone to do what you want.

59:29Jeff:To create something and then do what you will with what you... Like there's kind of a Buddhist like mandala quality to it as well. You make the mandala with the sand and then you just rake over it and start over. And they're not, you don't improve on them, right? You don't say this is a better, bigger clockwork. Yeah, exactly. It's also a form of resistance to industry just to make something for the sake of making it and then destroy it. You don't have to sell it. And we would say today you don't have to turn every one of your hobbies into a side hustle. Right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. No sub stack about how make little goldfish is here for you.

1:00:00You had a couple other straight thoughts, Rebecca. Rebecca, what else do you want to hit?

1:00:03Jeff:Oh, what do I want to hit? Oh, I just loved the idea in the book of insomnia as a plague. The characters suffer a plague of insomnia. And once people in the household realize that some of them have got it, the other people flee because they don't want to have it. And like, that's what insomnia feels like. It feels like a plague has come to your house. And I love that he reached for that. Would also just love to try levitation by means of chocolate. I was a did Marquez invent edible THC infused drinking chocolates. There's a lot less drug use here than I would have thought. But that's a different time and place.

1:00:40You would imagine there's a lot of representations of different kinds of mind altering substances. But since you could just float sometimes, maybe you don't need them.

1:00:48Jeff:I think they use sex as a drug in this book. Yeah, I think that's right. That's the mind altering substance. Yeah. Yeah. Notable quotes. There's many here. There's so many. Where would you like to try to go? Well, I love the way he describes people. And Pilar Turnera gets described as a merry, foul-mouthed, provocative woman. That's your tattoo? I have the tattoo candidates. I think that's a good one. I put it on my headstone, you know. Oh, okay. Give my eulogy someday and say I was a merry, foul-mouthed. Oh, that's a good one. Tattoo, headstone, or eulogy for one of these. Provocative woman. Jose Arcadio Buendia gets described as being fascinated by an immediate reality that came to be more fantastic than the vast universe of his imagination.

1:01:29Jeff:Like, that's the experience of reading the book. Normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war. Nothing ever happened. That's more of a Joseph Heller-like line to me. That really felt more... Catch-22 must be on our line. It is. Oh, yeah. Catch-22 on the back of this book would be really interesting. Yeah. Let's see. You've got some more. I'll take a couple of turns here. innovation as forgetting, replacing the natural world. So here's the quote, in the freeing of the birds, which since the time of the founding had made time merry with their flutes and installing in their place, musical clocks in every house.

1:02:11So, and then technology not only replaces the natural, but it's also so interesting that it distracts us from pursuing higher aims. Does this sound familiar to anybody? Jose Arcado Buendia stopped his pursuit of the image of God, convinced of his non-existence, and took the pianola apart in order to decide for its magical secret. So the piano is so interesting in its inner working, so compelling and distracting that just understanding, making better pianos, making better apps, making better algorithms took us away from, distracts us from sort of higher ends, more satisfying and sustaining pursuits.

1:02:48Where else do you want to go with quotes, Rebecca?

1:02:50Jeff:Oh, yeah. This one just sums up, I think, the experience of reading the book. It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants of Macondo in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. Like, there are moments where Marquez kind of peeks around the corner and is like, I know what I'm doing to you. And that is certainly one of them. I do wonder because we talked about this strategy, structural thing he does where there's like a multi-page long paragraph that does come to a point and usually it's a line of dialogue or an exchange between two people that clarifies and crystallizes kind of everything that's come before a big idea, a big moment.

1:03:39And then we go right back into it. So we get a momentary oasis. But I wonder if those moments hit even harder because we have been trudging, dealing with, stuck in the muck and mire. And then we sort of come up for air for a second. It's kind of exhilarating in its own way. And I don't know how much of that is. I don't know what his intention was. Did he know he was doing that or was it feel or something else? But it's very Marquezian. I don't remember anyone else doing something like this.

1:04:07Jeff:I had a similar feeling reading Midnight's Children, but again, that's influenced and inspired by this book where you're like, that paragraph was five pages long and there was no punctuation. And like, thank God someone is saying something. Right. Yeah. Is it an admission or is it the point? I don't, I find myself both of them being possible. Then this is how I really want to go out. In accordance with her last wishes, she was not buried in a coffin, but sitting in her rocker, which eight men lowered by ropes into a huge hole dug in the center of the dance floor. There's so many burials, so many alternate ways of being buried.

1:04:45That's a whole graduate thesis seminar right there. Mortuary rights and Gabriel Garcia.

1:04:49Jeff:You could like sex and death and 100 years of solitude. Take it. People are buried and locked into rooms and boarded into rooms and boarded into chambers and sealed up. And here's the last one I want to get to. Yeah, it's despite, this is me. So despite the human capacity for invention, we are still always ourselves. And this is Marquez. Incredible things are happening in the world, he said to Ursula. Right there across the river, there are all kinds of magical instruments while we keep on living like donkeys. Like no matter where we go, no matter what we invent, we go to the moon and we're still our dumb old human selves.

1:05:26And that's just the way that it is. All right. Is it for you? Well, if you can't tell by now, maybe we can summarize a little bit, Rebecca. This is for you, if what?

1:05:37Jeff:Oh, if you're good to hang with unanswered questions, you read the opening line of the book at the top of the show. We meet Colonel Arcadio Buendia when he is standing before a firing squad. That firing squad gets referred to over and over and over. Other people apparently go before the firing squad. So many firing squads. That also gets mentioned. Spoiler alert, that firing squad never happens in the book. Like, we don't know ever why he was before the firing squad. And was the other Arcadio who was also before the firing squad, was it the same firing squad? Was it for the same reasons? Did these happen in totally separate times?

1:06:15Jeff:Who knows? Marquez definitely missed that part of a grad school where they talk about Chekhov's gun. Yeah, or where you have to pay off on what you say in the first sentence of the essay. Watch this. Right. Yeah, just no rules. There are no rules here. So you've got to be comfortable with that. If you like or you're open to magical realism, like if you have enjoyed other works of magical realism or things that feel slightly surreal, as you called it, original recipe, like this is the most, you know, sort of unfiltered. It's not from concentrate. Like this is the real deal. Check it out. And if you don't need a book to have a point, like he is saying things in this book, but this is an experience of a read.

1:07:01Jeff:It is not an A to B plot situation. Yeah. And maybe not. It's always the converse for you, but especially if you were a plot reader or a character reader, really, because there are lots of names, but it's a little more difficult to ascribe character traits to them. they are figures throughout the book but it's like your favorite character is going to be very well milky 80s for me but that's a that's also a grad school paper we could talk about some other day um there are all kinds of there's all kinds of violence and uh sexual trigger warnings things to watch out for nothing is presented as harrowing which in itself may be maybe troubling in some of these moments but nothing is especially graphic it does have a fable-like quality and that's another way where Amy Burek connects to Homeric, where more legalistic, conventional mores don't apply.

1:07:52Maybe they should, but they don't in these particular moments. The immortal questions that aren't asked, which of these are primary here? What is the good life? How do I owe my neighbor? Pardon me. How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? What's the deal with good and evil? And the answer is yes, Rebecca, Absolutely yes.

1:08:15Jeff:Yes. Concerned with all of them, but concerned with none of them in a really overt way. Yeah. Or he's not concerned with answering them. Like, there are not answers to any of these questions, I don't think, in the text. I don't feel like Marquez is where you go if you want answers. But in a real, questions beget questions beget more questions. Uncertainty begets more uncertainty. But can it be kind of pleasurable and exciting? all of these are here. Yeah. I think it's maybe less interested in what's the deal with good and evil because it's just people, right? They're not villains, even in a book that is clearly about colonialism and Marquez being a leftist.

1:08:57There's no Darth Vader figure. There's no, I mean, there are bad people, but the people that are sort of outside the frame conducting the war that sometimes our people go and be a part of and then come back from. So it's not really about good and evil. It's about sort of a side of the human coin or the side of the human dice that gets rolled. I think the how to deal with death is clearly there. The one that I find myself most interested in is his, is what else might there be? Because we do see these characters that go off to explore, they try to understand things differently or invent something or spend decades walled up into a study reading the same text over and over.

1:09:36Jeff:Or there's tarot cards. Yeah, I find myself very interested in Marquez being interested in how else could we understand and be in the world. And those moments I found very compelling. And I've always found myself lingering on them. Relatedly, are we sure this is about art and writing? I mean, we laugh almost every time this comes up. Every time. But this is what happens with the great books. You know, like not all books are overtly about art and writing, but I think great artists are concerned with it. Characters here are constantly reading and they're writing and they're referring to histories that are real and histories that are imagined.

1:10:12Jeff:They're creating stuff. They're destroying it. They're creating it again. Like, yes. Yes. And then there's direct stuff characters discover libraries and they discover that fiction can be a way to have to have play and that literature can be a source of play and a source of making fun of people. That's a great line. Right? That it's a source of power. Just 100 million percent. This is about art and writing. Yeah. Could you get the gist of this from watching The Signal? That's an interesting question because there now is one that you and I have not sampled, Netflix multi-series one. Marquez himself didn't think it could be done, didn't want it to be done.

1:10:52He certainly didn't want it to be done in a language other than Spanish. and as sometimes happens once the creator of the work goes away and the estate is super interested in other things than maybe necessarily what the artists would want themselves. It was optioned to Netflix and it debuted in 2024. You looked at more of the reviews than I did. You said middling to positive. That was my sense of it, but I hadn't looked at the reviews myself.

1:11:17Jeff:The reviews are middling to positive. It looks like the first series, the first season that aired last year probably accounts for about 25 % of the book. So they're going to go several seasons of it. And the reviews that I came across said it's very faithful to the plot. Related to that, some of the reviews were like, it's a problem that it is so faithful that it's uncritical about the men's relationships with young girls. So that apparently does get depicted on screen. The second season is due in 2026. I have mixed feelings about this. It feels impossible. Like, I think Marquez was probably right when he didn't think it could be done, didn't want it to be done.

1:12:03Jeff:I'm grimacing. Yeah, my bullet point here is it seemed impossible to me when I read it, and it still seems impossible to me now. Though I do want to try one episode just to see what compromise. You can't do it. You can't do the books. You have to make some choices. and the nature of those choices I do find fascinating, but I do not find myself compelled at all. I'll be like, yeah, I'd really like to see this on screen. And I'm the kind of person that sometimes wants to see a book I love put on screen. This is not one of those. Yeah, I think I would love to go to an art exhibit of paintings inspired by 100 Years of Solitude or to spend an afternoon in big rooms with yellow flowers coming from the ceiling and to look at like a lot of, I'm sure there are surrealists that were inspired by this book.

1:12:50Jeff:That's the kind of art that I feel like you could take inspiration to adapt 100 Years of Solitude imagery of the book. But it feels to me like a book that does things that only books can do. And in this case, I'm like, I will probably watch one episode of the adaptation just also out of curiosity. But I'm not, I'm not looking for that. It doesn't feel like an onscreen experience of it will be additive in any way. Yeah. I mean, we haven't really talked about this, but you're hearing behind our reticence about an adaptation is that it is a construction of language. Like it's allowed to do things because language can compress all kinds of things in a way that other mediums really don't have the ability to do.

1:13:33And to try to expand them onto the screen seems like a daunting and maybe fruitless task to me.

1:13:43Jeff:And also like the ghost of Gabriel Garcia, Garcia Marquez might come back to haunt you for having done this. It might be right there. It could be here. We don't know. Making gold little fishes in the corner. All right. So let's say that we were making them. Is this a Muppet version? What's the Muppet version of this, Rebecca? I'm kind of into the chaos of a Muppet version of this, like super problematic because of all the problematic things we talked about. We won't do those. We won't do those scenes. Yeah, if you put those off to the side, if we're not going to do those, I think, yeah, I think a Muppet version where the only human character is the first Jose Arcadio Buendia tied to the giant chestnut tree outside.

1:14:23Jeff:And the Muppets come and visit him. And the Muppets have Muppet chaos and they bang their pots and pans. And just, I'm not down for the Muppet sex scenes. This is going to be a PG rated Muppet adaptation, 100 Years of Solitude for Kids, which is a concept I've never considered before. The YA version of this? What a weird idea that is. Yeah, but that could be fun. I mean, it might lend itself to a Muppet Show-like presentation where you're just doing scenes, right? Like the curtain closes and we're going to open up in a different scene. And then you close the curtain and there's something a little bit different.

1:14:56I actually would watch just a regular sort of play version of that where maybe on an even given night, like let's say it's a theatrical performance where you're getting seven or eight vignettes, but each night's performance has a different arrangement, right? I like that. It would be pretty cool. to see. Trivia adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes, etc. I know very little literary gossip, but this was one I read and it stuck with me forever. That one time Gabriel Garcia Marquez got sucker punched by his fellow Latin American Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Losa at a movie screening in public.

1:15:24Just came up and popped him in the grill and too long did not read. It was over a woman. Marquez immediately ran to a photographer friend to have pictures taken. The pictures weren't public in 2007, but apparently it's the pictures of Marquez with a giant flipping grin on his face and a huge bruise. Incredible. Do we know who got the girl? Much like 100 Years of Solitude, it is so confusing about the relationship and nature of these things that I think is best left unsaid. You can use your old Google fingers if you want to know more about it. Maybe we'll just let that one stay a mystery. Notable sucker punches.

1:15:58I remember a story of Stanley Crouch sucker punching the critic Dale Peck in a New York restaurant. That might be a good bonus episode for us at some point.

1:16:05Jeff:We don't get this in modern literature anymore. We really don't. You don't walk up to a dude and just whop him one anymore. Or even like feuding critics. Didn't Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright have like a long running thing? Yeah, they really feuded. You know, it was funny. This is outside the scale. But I think one of the reasons over the last few days on the internet, the Tarantino slagging Paul Dano in... Which will be old news by the time this episode drops. It doesn't happen so often. Yeah. But when it does, it's like, whoa, but it didn't used to happen a lot more frequently. This is a weak sauce, weird looking guy in this movie.

1:16:39Jeff:Yeah. And you're right. But just a walk up sucker punch. I love that if we're getting one piece of gossip about this book, this is the one you've got. Yeah. I think Marquez's life was messy. I have not read it. I assume there's a biography. I've not read this. But that even I know this suggests there's a lot more. That's just the tip of the iceberg here. Yeah. This is the story that made it public. Like what else is out there? All right. Let's do some hot takes, Rebecca. You go. Is this the horniest book in the modern canon?

1:17:11Well, you've got, well, consider the candidates here. I think you're thinking along the same lines.

1:17:17Jeff:We've got Lolita, which is horny and also problematic. You got A Sport and a Pastime, which is my favorite horny book in the modern canon. Very horny. We'll do that on this show at some point, and you will blush for the entire episode. Giovanni's Room. Those are all more. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs comes to mind. That is, there's a lot going on there. And if you know, you know. And if you don't, you can find out. That's a blurb. There's a lot going on there. There's a lot going on there. I think in terms of number, volume, and variety, you have to be correct about this. Yeah. There's maybe more, like Lolita and a Sport and a Pastime and Giovanni's Room are all more like horny on the page like there's more description all fours can we put all fours in the modern canon it's pretty damn horny all fours is very horny um is it in the canon is more of a question i think it's maybe but it's of modern books that a lot of people have read and taken seriously of literary fiction it's it's certainly yeah and there's that's called all four for god's sake yeah it's like it's very on the page yes and there's just a lot of doing it in 100 years of solitude.

1:18:28And superhuman sexual feats of like 70 dudes a day for multiple years to pay off your debt. I mean, tough stuff.

1:18:35Jeff:I think I'm asking this question about, is it the horniest? Because often horniness comes across as interior, like fantasy and desire and the way that those things are described. And we don't get a lot of interiority. We don't get the characters thinking about how much they want to bone each other and what they want to do. But we do just get it. Like there's furniture breaking sex that I was like, is this? We get it and so do others. Everybody's getting it everywhere. Every which way. I think it's, we will struggle to talk about a hornier book. I will certainly struggle to talk about a hornier book.

1:19:11Jeff:Definitely in the horny book Hall of Fame. Yeah, certainly. Speaking of Hall of Fames, I think this is one of the best opening lines in literary history. And maybe if pressed, I think it might be the best. Bold claims. Just so many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Arellano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. And in microcosm, it does that thing we were talking about. There's a lot. There's a lot. And you're not sure how it holds together. But then it literally here, in this case, crystallizes into this one evocative singular image.

1:19:50Jeff:It's a great line. It's amazing. It's really amazing. book would end at the firing squad and why he is thinking about ice yeah um i i whenever someone asked me about great opening lines like there's things that people remember you know um one two four was angry spiteful spiteful pardon me i'm doing a translation uh you know it was a truth it's a truth universally acknowledged that young men with a good fortune and want of a wife that's Pride and Prejudice, Call Me Ishmael. It's a cold, bright day in April and the clocks are striking 13. The clock is striking 13, yeah. Sing to me a muse of that man of many turns.

1:20:30Or sing to a muse of the rage of Peleus' son, The Great Achilles. But I think great opening lines are a shorter list than people think. Maybe that's my real hot take. I don't think there's as many as people think about great opening lines. We get to five and we're kind of out. and like half of them are by Toni Morrison

1:20:48Jeff:like 1-2-4 was spiteful quiet as it's kept they shoot the white girl first but that's a different maybe we could do that some other time but like it's singularly evocative and it stands on its own as you know a miniature version of what Marquez is doing yeah and that as I said earlier like there's no payoff for it and it's fine that there's no payoff for it it's just real ball like that's real god level stuff Yeah. Further reading recommendations, Rebecca? You've got some and I've got some. If you're interested in more of the mechanics of it, you can go listen to our Book Riot podcast episode called What is Magical Realism?

1:21:25Jeff:We've name dropped Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie several times in this episode. That's clearly a child of 100 years of solitude and a build upon in some ways. I think that's worth a look. Like Water for Chocolate and House of the Spirits are both wonderful, more contemporary works of magical realism. Those are mine. Yeah. I have Go for Love and Time of Cholera, too. I mean, it's sort of obvious, but to follow on is more Marquez. I might even start there, honestly, if pressed. Blindness by José de Taramago, who is also a version of magical realism. this is the plague talk reminded me of it but the plague here is a blindness and much like in Marquez there's not like a moral that's easy it's more elemental it's more fable like it's easier to read it's quite a bit shorter but I think it's trafficking in some of the same things that Marquez is doing but pared down quite a bit it's pretty good cocktail party crib sheet three to five takeaways Rebecca what do you have I mean you start with magical realism is the supernatural as the mundane, or things that couldn't happen happen and the characters are fine with it.

1:22:37Jeff:When you're talking about the book specifically, the titular solitude is existential. Macondo is more exposed to the outside world and more foreigners arrive, and the Buendias feel more isolated. It's this one family as microcosm of what's happening. The erosion of solitude as a thing you can get in the modern world, and the erosion of one town's ability to really be by itself or to be isolated. Like no one can be isolated anymore. And Marquez is really writing into that space. Mine is, I mentioned a little bit before, but I think the fact that this has sold 50 million copies and has become an internationally beloved novel is truly shocking given the difficulty of getting through it, at times incomprehensibility, the complexity.

1:23:26I kind of can't believe it. This is not something that you would pick. This is not something that the AI algorithms would have put into their data sets and shot out. How many of those 50 million have been read? I think, is this the most abandoned book of all time? Is an interesting question.

1:23:47Jeff:Unanswerable, but agreeable. Unanswerable, yeah. Final beat, this is our zero to well-read score. Each one of our five categories gets a score from 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Our five categories are historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd read cred, and oh damn factor. Historical importance is very high, Rebecca, I would say. You got it. I think this is a 9 or 10. 9 or 10. Yeah, I think a 9 only because it's not 2 ,000 years old. I mean, seriously, it's not one of those. Readability, on the other hand, quite low, I would say. Two? What did we give?

1:24:24I mean, is it the most difficult book we've tackled thus far? Is it more difficult than My Children or Vineland?

1:24:30Jeff:I found Midnight's Children to be more difficult. This actually felt light to me coming off of Midnight's Children. Or lighter. It's not light, but lighter. I mean, Midnight's Children is longer. It's quite a bit longer, which matters. I don't remember what we gave that, but it feels like a three readability. Yeah, maybe a three. Current relevance of central questions. I mean, one and ten. So call it a five? Which doesn't, none of it feels right. I think one and ten is the most. One and ten. That's the most Marquez way to answer it. Let's leave it there. One and ten. Book nerd read credit. I think this is quite high.

1:25:07Jeff:I do too. If you finished it. If you finished it and gave it, if you really did and you gave it a serious go and made it to the end, I am awarding you an eight and a half. Okay. I agree. It's not Ulysses. I can support an eight and a half. It's not Ulysses. Ulysses is a 10. History of the Peloponnesian War all the way through is a 10. I had to read that my freshman year in college, and I'm still recovering. Then you get a 10. I hope you liked it. O'Dam Factor, nine. Yeah, it's a nine. It's high. One of the higher scoring. This makes sense. This is a huge factor. Is there? Well, you know what? But we're going to do a little more question and wondering for those of you on the Patreon level for the bonus content.

1:25:55I've got some more questions for Rebecca, but we're going to leave that there. Our show notes are at bookriot.com slash listen. You can shoot us an email at zerotowellreadatbookriot.com. If you email us, I will email you back. And I probably will also have in our email signature sayings, hey, go rate and review us on Apple because you know what? You should. That would be super great of you.

1:26:14Jeff:Five stars. Five stars. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, thank you so much. Always a great time. This is a fun one.

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