BOOK REPORT: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Title: One Hundred Years of Solitude 
Author:  Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Copyright Date:  1967

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars ( epic )

Probably Garcia Marquez's finest and most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family.  Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul.  One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.

My Thoughts
I started to read One Hundred Years of Solitude on a whim. I picked it up while I was waiting for an evening meeting to start and I was engaged in the Buendia family immediately.  It wasn't until about a week later that I could start reading it however and during this hiatus, I found myself thinking about the book and where it might take me.

What I quickly found out was that Marquez was placing me in an epic tale that doesn't leave Macondo.  But it's the small details in this large story that make it so rich.  It is also the small details which make this an unexpectedly odd story. One Hundred Years of Solitude doesn't start out odd; the oddness evolves and grows throughout the book along with the town.  Just little things in the beginning really, a girl eating dirt here, a ghost there, maybe some blood flowing up hills on occasion. By the time I met the third generation of Beundias, nothing surprised me.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the title. I usually associate solitude with loneliness and depression, but Marquez portrays solitude as a driving force in life. It is woven it into every character's life, whether they were happy, sad, popular or a wall-flower. Many seek solitude as a way to escape the hustle and bustle of everyday life, while others do anything they can to avoid it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a deep and complex story. I enjoyed it on my first read, but I rated it four and a half stars because I know there are elements that I missed. It is very possible that I will be able to up the rating to five-stars on my next read. 

BOOK REPORT: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Title:                            Jane Eyre
Author:                        Charlotte Bronte
Original Copyright :  1847

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars ( classic )


My Thoughts
A few years ago, I started reading Jane Eyre but didn't finish it. I got about twenty percent through before I had to put it down to focus on other things.  Up to that point, Jane Eyre didn't engage me; I found it verbose and dry.  Once I was finally able to make enough time to pick up the book again, I didn't have the motivation to re-familiarize myself with the characters and story line   As a result, the book sat on the shelf in my bedside table for a long time.

Now, fast-forward to last September when I started up the Olio Scholar project.  Jane Eyre was still sitting on the shelf haunting me. I knew that I wanted to finish it.  It was too high on most reading lists to be ignored.  Too many people I knew listed it as an all-time favorite.  I vowed that I would try to read it again as part of the project.  However, I saved Jane Eyre until I got close to my goal of 25 books in a year before I picked it up.  I figured it would take me a while to push through the approximate five-hundred pages my edition contained and I didn't want to have success hinging on it.

Jane Eyre definitely exceeded my expectations.  I was expecting a dry story about a strong woman in a man's world finding love similar to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.  I expected it to be written in a dry, grammatically correct manner, providing insight into the human psyche with stuffy Victorian wit amid an oppressive social structure.  The language was definitely formal  but this wasn't the typical uptight British love story.  It is about a pious woman who desires a full life, with love simply being one piece.  This is one of the reasons that, in 1847, the book was controversial.  It was not a woman's place to be unsatisfied with her lot in life.  Her role was to marry as well as possible and then do everything she could to ensure the husband was well tended to.  

One thing I didn't expect the was the dark, Edgar-Allen Poe like undertones foreshadowed by the rookery looming over Thornfield Hall. I didn't expect the mysterious noises in the attic and unexplained fires.   I didn't expect the secrecy of Mr Rochester's staff.  I welcomed this dark layer as it added a depth to the story that kept me engaged.

One other thing that I noticed reading Jane Eyre.  I now know where J.K. Rowling got her inspiration for Harry Potter's upbringing; the parallels are undeniable.  Does this sound familiar? Jane's parents die and as an infant she is left at the door step of her aunt who promises to raise the child as her own, but instead treats her like dirt.  The children already in the household are pompous, rude brats who get everything they want and forever torment the new addition to the family.  The protagonist orphan is rescued from this domestic hell by going off to boarding school where she make a few friends and excels in her studies.  I wonder if the Bronte estate gets any of the money from the Harry Potter series?

I am glad I finished Jane Eyre.  It was an excellent book and It is easy to see why it is such a lasting story.  It still had its dry parts, don't get me wrong;  I said, "Get on with it!" on several occasions but I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a layered, well-written story.

BOOK REPORT: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Title:                                           Lolita

Author:                                       Vladimir Nabokov

Original Copyright Date:          1955

My Rating:            4 out of 5 stars  ( well done )


Back-cover Description
Awe and exhilaration-- along with heartbreak and mordant wit-- abound in Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Most of all, it is a meditation on love -- love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation

My Thoughts
When Lolita opens up, it immediately sets this story as a memoir-confession of a dying man in a prison or mental institution.  The main character, and narrator, Mr Humbert Humbert starts off as a child of 13 falling in love one summer with a girl (also 13).  She dies of Typhus suddenly.  

We then jump ahead to his adult years where he is a writer and academic in psychology and literature and he still has a fascination with pubescent girls between the ages of 10 and 14. He admits that he is the creepy man in the park that goes there only to ogle the girls, or nymphets, as he calls them. He admits he's had several trips to mental institutions and that he often spends the evening with young looking prostitutes. 

How does one say that they liked a book where the main storyline revolves around such a off-putting pedophile?   This is where Nabokov shines and my experience as a literary critic falters.  I just don't have a way to articulate *how* Nabokov keeps you engaged in such an off-putting story. But he does. I can really only give you my thoughts as I read it.   

Lolita is divided into two parts. In the first part of the novel, you are in the head of a mad-man crazed by pure, unadulterated (pun-intended??) love and devotion to his Lolita.  It seemed to me, in the first chapters describing their relationship, that Humbert is a full on schizophrenic where he became that 13 year old boy again.  His adoration of Lolita, his nervousness in anticipation of simply being in the same room as her;  the luck of a glancing touch seemed just like a 13 year old would behave around his first crush.  Nabokov balances this out with a narrator that interrupts himself to correct himself, or to say that he doesn't quite remember this detail or that. It pulled me out of his head, enough to keep me separated.  

There were also very obvious omissions to his story which kept me at a safe distance.  Everything he recollects is his side only; he doesn't project emotion for other characters, he only provides insight into the scenes which actively or directly concerned him. The other characters dialog is only there to either frame his thoughts or move the story along, but only as much as needed.  For example, Lolita's mother, Charlotte, dies after being hit by a car whilst in a panic having discovered Mr. Humbert's feeling towards her daughter.  Lolita was away at camp at the time and gets picked up by Mr. Humbert who told everyone (including Lo) that she was merely in a bad accident and in a hospital that was no where near where they lived.  In the telling of this scene, the narrator never tells of Lolita's concern or anxiety over her mother's condition.  It's as if she is just there for the ride; happily content on being his seductress.   When she finally says that she wants to go see her mother, he says, "She's Dead" and that's the end of the chapter.  That's all that is mentioned of it. No, "She cried for days, or She shed a single tear and glanced off into the distance"... Nothing.  They just keep driving around the country. I think this is what the literary critics call an unreliable narrator. 

Part two of the novel deals with the unraveling of his "peaceful life" with his beloved Lolita. Cracks appear in the lustful walls around the story through which you start to see glimpses of how Lolita actually viewed the situation.  She wasn't the willing partner he made her out to be.  After Lolita "betrays" him and escapes, the walls crumble all together.  Again, this reinforces the unreliable narrator construct.

At this point, Nabokov transforms the story with a seemingly theater of the absurd quality where actual emotion on the part of anyone is scarce.  His loss makes him numb, and that numbness seems to be projected onto other characters.  Mr. Humbert's desire to kill the man who took the object of all his love and devotion away is presented in a simply stoic and matter of fact way; the way a farmer might say he had to kill a wolf who got into his hen house...  Except, in this story, the man on the other side of the gun is also just as unemotional about his predicament.

All in all, it was a very good book, Literature in every sense of the word.  If you can get past the base pedophelia, then it is a good read.

BOOK REPORT: Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Title:                    Huckleberry Finn

Author:                Mark Twain (Samual Clemens)

Original Copyright Date:         1885

Would Recommend to a friend?: Yes

Back Cover Description: 

Floating down the Mississippi on their raft, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, find life filled with excitement and the spirit of adventure. Join Huck and Jim and their old friend Tom Sawyer as they come up against low-down thieves and murderers, whilst being chased by Huck's evil, drunken father who is after Huck's treasure. It is a trip that you will never tire of.

My Thoughts:

I was amazed at the complexity of Huckleberry Finn; it went well beyond my expectations. I was expecting an adventure story following a boy riding down the Mississippi River, getting into all sorts of scrapes and near-misses caused by Huck's "boys will be boys" attitude;  I was expecting Treasure Island or King Soloman's Mines. What I got was literature in every sense of the word.  Slavery, Race, Religion, are just some of the themes that even a non-english major can pick out.

I was shell-shocked by the bluntness of language used by Mark Twain when I read some of the passages. For example, the following occurs when Jim (the runaway slave) and Huck have been on the river for a few days is as simple of an explanation of how Huck saw slavery that is, to me, completely unfathomable today:

"Jim Talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn't sell them, they'd get an Ab'litionist to go and steal them.

    It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, 'give a nigger an inch and he'll take and ell.' Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children -- children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that hadn't ever done me no harm."

The passage also demonstrates one of the themes that struck me the most. that despite being an orphan most of his life, an outsider who doesn't want to fit into Miss Watson's normal life with schoolin' and churchin', with a drunk abusive father showing up to take advantage of  Huck's fortune outlined in Tom Sayer, he still thinks about slavery as just the way things were, and asks himself why he is helping Jim. Huck wrestles with what is deemed to be normal and right throughout the book. It doesn't take Huck long to realize that the right thing to do is to help Jim, even though his reasoning isn't quite as strong as, "Slavery is bad and I should do what I can to stop it."

"... and I see it warn't no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don't get started right when he's little, ain't got no show -- when the pinch comes there ain't nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on, --s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you feel better than what you do now? No, says I, I'd feel bad --I'd feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't  no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?"

and further, as Huck and Jim travel on down the river a ways, we see his internal conflict grow from a selfish motivation to keep moving down the river with Jim to a religious one as things get a bit more difficult.
The following quote has Huck praying to "quit being the kind of boy he was, and be better".  Better in terms of what was again, deemed to be normal and right...

"So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie-- and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie-- I found that out."

He thinks that by not turning in Jim, people would consider it a sin; that to not live "right", he was committing a sin. But the bigger sin to Huck is not being honest and true to himself.

A few years from now, I would like to read Huckleberry Finn again to try and get more from it.  I have no doubt that this book will offer me something more.