Saturday, July 07, 2012

El otoño del patriarca

When Memoria de mis putas tristes is failing, you enter Cien años de soledad, when El coronel no tiene quien le escriba, and you are left with Crónica de una muerte anunciada.

22 comments:

Mr roT said...

I find it difficult to escape Cien Años, don't think El Colonel is too important, and don't like Otoño at all.

Curiously, it is Charly that got me interested in Otoño, and that's the only dumb thing he's ever said about books (other than loving Voyage au Bout de la Nuit).

Mr roT said...

Good title, but the body of the post is odious. As I have said, there's no getting Cien Años out of your system, if you can read.

Tecumseh said...

Odious? Man, oh, man, you are getting cranky with old age!

I was amazed when reading Cien Años as a teenager. Of course, I read it in French, as Cent ans de solitude. How about you?

Mr roT said...

Español, of course i read the original language unless I don't understand it.

I even read Celine in French, and only missed how Charly could consider that stuff genius.

That was way before FCP days.

Tecumseh said...

OK, so let me try and revisit my "odious" post, this time in English:

When the memories of those melancholy whores are fading, you enter hundred years of solitude, when no one writes to the colonel, and all is left is to chronicle a death foretold.

There, is it any better this way?

Tecumseh said...

I read L'Automne du patriarche and Pas de lettre pour le colonel also in French. Without Charly telling me to do it!

Mr roT said...

Español, of course I read the original language unless I don't understand it.

I even read Celine in French, and only missed how Charly could consider that stuff genius.

That was way before FCP days.

I am very impressed that you were impressed positively with 100 yrs. GGM is a damned commie, as you must have known.

Incidentally, AA is the only person that comes close to you that i know and is as anti-commie as you.

Curiously, he is also a big fan of 100 yrs.

Tecumseh said...

Hey, I was only a teenager at the time, I had no friggin' idea who Garcia Marquez was at the time, I just picked up Cent ans de solitude (no mean feat finding that book at the time, out there in the steppes--it was not on the approved list), and just read it for the heck of it. Kind of blew my mind, I had never read something like that before, or after for that matter.

Mr roT said...

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Thos. Jefferson

Tecumseh said...

How could I tell Garcia Marquez was a crypto-commie by just reading his book? There is nothing about that shit in Cien Años.

Mr roT said...

100 has the imperial army machinegunning the proletariat.

Tecumseh said...

That's called poetic license.

Arelcao Akleos said...

Yeah, there ain't any "Communism" in those one hundred years of solitude. In his writings, Gabriel Marquez was no party line hack like Maxim Gorky.

As for Imperial Armies shooting down workers or stinking peasants, that's pretty much a quiet summer's afternoon on Planet Pepe.

Mr roT said...

They have workers in Paris?

Mr roT said...

Hilarious. I always thought sex was rec., not work.

Tecumseh said...

Ask pauvre gerbil.

Mr roT said...

You know the joke that ends with,"That's your day in the barrel," right?

Tecumseh said...

Never heard of it. Something to do with the Niagara Falls?

Mr roT said...

I'll have to relate it;

So this young man gets a job on a ranch and looking around at the open countryside he wonders about entertainment.

He asks the foreman who suggests that he put his dick in a hole cut in a barrel sitting outside the feed store.

The young man does as he's told and experiences an ecstasy hitherto unknown to him. The foreman tells him that he can use the barrel every day except Friday.

The young man asks why not Friday, to which he receives the answer,"That's your day in the barrel."

Tecumseh said...

Hah! That's a good one. Where did you hear it? Must be an old joke, no?

Mr roT said...

I was in high school at the time, but it has the feel of a classic. It was told to me by a real country guy with a fantastic and real cowboy accent.

In that accent, just the word 'dick' was shocking and the ideas of sodomy or fellatio or homosexuality at all were incongruous!

I come from a very small town.

Mr roT said...

I am impressed that you read 100 in French and that it was banned in Romania. Seems that you and I and AA are not alone in admiring the book.

I should say though that GGM didn't know much about how to write sex. Love he was good at though. E.g. one of the Arcadios falls nuts for a Remedios and can't walk down a street without falling to jags of crying.

I still like the name Remedios though modern Mexicans are put off by its old-fashionedness. They're wrong.