Review Post 23 - Short Men

Must be the year of the novella. I started the year with three short works in three days, and it seems to have rolled on nicely from there, with several more books of less than 150 pages read to date. Of course, my new, lazier blogging regime has had a little to do with that. Last year, when I was typing out a full review for every book I read, reading this many novellas would have resulted in the little-known medical condition of Sensory Post Overload Tension Syndrome (SPOTS) as I struggled feverishly to review each one in the style it craved and deserved. believe me, it's not pretty.

Anyway, here are some choice thoughts about two slight works by a couple of wonderful writers. Short ones, of course.

*****

Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Chronicle of a Death Foretold (translated into English by Gregory Rabassa) is apparently a reconstruction of an event from the writer's youth and recounts the death of Santiago Nasar, victim of an 'honour killing' in a small Colombian town. The reader knows Nasar's fate right from the start, and it's only a few pages until we know who carried out the murder - and the reason for it. The beauty of this novella is not in the who and what, but in the how and why, and the way the author unwraps his story, layer by layer, like a beautifully wrapped Christmas present, is a joy to behold. The journalistic approach adopted by the writer reminds me of Heinrich Böll's Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum, but where Böll's work was taut, aggressive and detached, GGM is an integral part of the mazy, rambling story, one of the many extras roaming the streets (and slipping in and out of bed with the madam of the local brothel, not something you often find chroniclers doing).

The story slips back and forth in time, meandering occasionally, before being gently guided back into the semblance of a linear tale. Great care is taken with painting the people populating the story, to the extent of adding interesting details about the most minor of characters (such as a policemen who we learn "...died the following year, gored in the jugular vein by a bull during the national holidays."). In fact, the victim himself seems to be less important than the host of bystanders who look on guiltily or try to find the unfortunate Santiago to warn him of his fate.

You see, by the time of the murder, virtually everyone in the town knows that it is going to happen, with the notable exception of the victim. His murderers, damned to avenge their sister's honour, but hopeful that someone may still prevent them from doing it, tell all and sundry of their intentions. Santiago's friends scour the streets, trying to find him and warn him before it's too late; the police and the priest are informed and several steps are taken to prevent the tragedy from taking place. As we know from page one of the book, somehow they are all unsuccessful.

Less a story than the tale of an old man on a search for an elusive truth, Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a wonderful piece of writing and well worth reading. As with most novellas though, whether it is worth buying is another matter. I devoured the 122 pages of large type in one sitting, and I am very glad that Narre Warren Library had a copy on the shelf...

*****

The wonderful people at the library had also decided to stock up on V.S. Naipaul, and this book would have been worth purchasing. The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book and Other Comic Inventions is an omnibus containing a collection of short stories and two novellas: The Suffrage of Elvira (which I read last month) and Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion.

Mr. Stone... is an early work by the Trinidad-born Nobel Laureate, which takes place in London in the 1960s. Richard Stone is a lifelong bachelor, nearing retirement, who, after meeting a widow at a friend's dinner party, somehow finds himself married a few months later. Thrown by his change in circumstances, and haunted by a chance encounter which leads him to consider his upcoming retirement, he throws himself into the development of an idea for his work which will have ramifications for everyone in his life: the Knights Companion...

This novella started off as a short story but eventually became too long and was published in its own right, and, for the first half at least, it seemed like a concept extended beyond its natural life. The idea appeared a little drawn out, and I had trouble seeing where the story was going. Eventually though, as Stone stops fighting against the unfairness in the world and the appropriation of his ideas at work, he starts to regain his equilibrium and seeks comfort in the natural world, his garden and the once-hated cat from next door. This sketching of the inner life of an elderly gentleman is one of Naipaul's strengths. Just as he does in A House for Mr. Biswas, here he draws out the inner dignity of a powerless man, surrounded by women at home and eclipsed by pushier, more cunning colleagues in the work environment.

By the end of the novella, the circle of life has turned again. Stone has retired, the trees are in bloom, and a familiar pair of eyes greet him on his return to his little house. Despite the changes around him, the elderly man now feels comfortable with his life again. It's a charming tale, but one that whets the appetite rather than sates it. After reading three of his earlier works this year, I feel ready to move on to some of his later, more famous novels now. Who knows, I may even buy them...

44 - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Last year I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera', Garcia Marquez's novel of a love story in old age, so I thought I knew roughly what 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' would be like. As it turns out, I was ever so slightly wrong... The casual prose dragging the reader languidly through decades in the life of its protagonists was the same; however, the content, while still set in Latin America and dealing with love, lust and family life, was, to put it mildly a bit different.

In my last post, I compared Nick Earls' short stories to Haruki Murakami's novels in the way that the everyday is described in great detail while being peppered by events which are slightly less real; little did I know that this style of writing ('magical realism') was coined to describe the work of South American novelists like Garcia Marquez. From flying carpets whizzing past the window to four-and-a-half-year rainstorms, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' has something for everyone without turning into a fantasy book, and the reader can accept these abnormal occurrences without it affecting the enjoyment of the story.

At the centre of the book is the tempestuous Buendia clan, whose patriarch, Jose Arcadio, strikes out from his hometown with his wife, Ursula, in an attempt to escape the ghost of a man he killed, and founds the town of Macondo in an uninhabited part of his country. A century later, after walking the reader through the experiences of the children, grand-children, friends, concubines, lovers, partners and animals of what, at times, is a hugely powerful and culturally dominating family, the book ends with the disappearance of all that has gone before and the town's return to its earlier obscurity.

The Buendia family are a collection of larger-than-life characters, from Jose Arcadio and the long-lived Ursula, to their sons Aureliano and Jose Arcadio and a whole host of their descendants, many of whom share their forefather's names. The men of the family, often divided over the six featured generations into the calm, calculating Aurelianos and the aggressive, hard-living Jose Arcadios, build, fight, whore and die; the women, most of whom marry into the family, are either scheming, tenacious and hard as nails, or beautiful and somewhat detached. Over and over again, names are handed down, children are brought up, and the same mistakes are made. Although it seems as if the Buendias are merely a victim of circumstances, we finally find out that their rise and fall has been predicted all along.

Despite the size of the Buendia family, theirs is not a house of laughter and love (although a theme of barely suppressed and finally unwtting incest runs through the tale), with many of the family members preferring to keep themselves to themselves, some to the extent of locking themselves in a small room for years at a time. The solitude of the title refers to the lack of support for each other and the looseness of the ties which would normally bind a family together. While the women do try to keep the family (and the house, a symbol of the family) together, time eventually defeats them all, and everything returns to its natural state.

However, the solitude refers not only to the Buendias, but also to Macondo, the town which the original Jose Arcadio founded. The completely new town gradually grows and becomes more and more important owing to Aureliano's role in the country's political wars, finally becoming a centre of commerce with links to the outside world by road and rail. However, as time passes, so do the temporary riches; the outsiders leave again, the buildings crumble, and the town is once more isolated from the rest of civilisation. In the space of the hundred years of the title, the town is born, expands, is ruined and disappears.

The book ends in a whirlwind of emotions (amongst other things...), and it takes a while for the dust to (literally) settle on what has happened and to think about what the whole point of the book was. One rather obvious one is, as was discussed in Sophocles' famous plays, check your girlfriend's birth certificate (just to make sure that the names on it aren't the same as the ones on yours); the story begins and ends, and largely hinges on, incest and its consequences. Another one is slightly more palatable but no less important; nothing lasts forever. Just as civilisations rise and fall and football teams go from losers to champions to idiots again, the fortunes of people and places can move in cycles, swinging between famous highs and ignominious lows. It's something we should all be wary of at the time of our great successes. Time and fortune may lift us up, but they can always send us crashing back to earth.