Back to Blog
There is the sense of the action moving full-tilt, almost out of control, but never really. The characters wake up, go out, have dinner, come home, have sex, go to sleep, get up in the morning, and so on, and all of this action occurs during the briefest passages of text. There are stories nested within stories nested within stories. The book is full of the so called Magic Realism used by Garcia Marquez and Rushdie himself. Because he does not at first succumb to the erotic offerings of these creatures-he has a very obnoxious sense of personal honor-he is able to preserve enough presence of mind to chronicle the many weird goings on. The premise is that in the 1760s a Walloon officer named Alphonse (commissioned by Philip V) while traveling on leave in Andalucia, for centuries an Islamic land until the Reconquista, finds himself skirting a realm of ghosts, phantoms, specters, kindly bandits, storytelling gypsies and cabbalists. As Salman Rushdie says in an attached blurb ".it reads like the most brilliant modern novel." I think that might be an effect of the recent English translation offered here that seems to give the text such a contemporary feel, like a modern-day historic novel. The writing is thought by scholars to have begun about 1809. Unlike many so called classic texts I have read this one doesn't seem to have dated much.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |