orioles

Some progress on Gabriel Garcia Marquez:

I gave up on Autumn of the Patriarch because the edition I have has no paragraph delineation, very sparse periods (I count about 3 periods per page), which makes a difficult to read book even more strenuous to read. Also too many 5 words+ names of generals to remember.

The other three are good, I think I prefer his shorter works more, if only because they require less effort to appreciate.


From Memories of My Melancholy Whores:

The world is moving ahead. Yes, I said, it's me gong ahead, but it's revolving around the sun. He kept my Sunday column because he could not have found another cable editor. Today I know I was right, and I know why. The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.

From Strange Pilgrims:

Since I described the European cities where the stories take place from memory, and at a distance, I wanted to verify the accuracy of my recollections after twenty years [...] Not one of [the cities] had any connection to my memories. Through an astonishing inversion, all of them, like all or present-day Europe, had become strange: True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality. At last I had found [...] what only the passing of the years could give: a perspective in time.

(introduction)

It was difficult for him to believe that time could cause so much ruin not only in his life but in the world.

(end of first paragraph of the first shot story)

A good review via Goodreads on On Love and Other Demons:

If Garcia Marquez explored the metaphor or love as a disease in "Love in the Time of Cholera", then here he centers his story around the metaphor of love as madness and demonic possession.
[...]
Also, this book focuses on one incident during a very short period of time and therefore reads very differently than Garcia Marquez's more famous extensive sagas.