Gabriel García Márquez
Cent'anni di solitudine

" It hadn't occurred to him until then to think of literature as the best toy ever invented for making fun of people, (..)"

So, here, I think I want to start from here.

Here, right here, I seem to be able to glimpse a sort of, as they say, key to interpreting the entire novel. Then it remains to be seen if it is really so, or if it's just me rambling to lend support to my (the tip is actually from Pier Paolo, to be honest) shaky precarious considerations.

Well. More likely the latter, I'd say. No offense to Pier Paolo (rest his soul)..

I read, on the back of my copy of the book, the elusive Back Cover Blurb, which, apparently, a gathering of very authoritative critics consider One Hundred Years of Solitude the number two work in Spanish literature of all time, behind Don Quixote.

Well, besides this strange mania of drafting every kind of ranking as if it were a sports competition or, I don't know, nutritional values, this strange obsession with quantifying quality, certifying it with numbers where the higher the better, well then, besides this, there is also another thing that seems a bit odd to me: I must say, I don't know Spanish literature very well, but to see that only one book among all those written in Spanish is superior to One Hundred Years of Solitude, well, as I said before, seeing this, leaves me a bit baffled.

Far be it from me to say that Marquez doesn't know what he's doing, in fact, he knows it all too well, and perhaps here a "unfortunately" would fit well. Marquez strikes me as a technician, an expert in artifice, a literate person. And that's it.

Someone who knows well which strings to pull, where to aim, and how to do it, someone who wants to elicit a certain emotional response, a certain consensus, and knows how to achieve it.

I like blood.

Alright then, a technician, as I was saying, and little else. Or so it seems to me, at least.

There's a lot of cinema in One Hundred Years of Solitude, too much cinema. It's just missing the blood.

I like blood.

Anyway, it occurs to me to say here, it might be a sort of precursor to so many best-sellers published in the thirty-fourty years that followed, which seem to be written with a screenplay adaptation already in mind, which are ugly.

One Hundred Years of Solitude isn't ugly, it's simply innocuous, and all the pounds of rhetoric intended to entertain and move risk making this book almost apathetic.

Too much cinema, as I was saying. Cinema on paper, and not of the best caliber, that's for sure.

A compendium of fossilized characters, functions, stereotypes, harnessed on the surface, too easy to represent and to understand.

Magical realism, dear, is this stuff here, they will tell me. But anyway, I don't know the context well enough to be sure, but if it's really like that, I'd prefer grandma's fairy tales.

And then an endless rundown of memorable, emotional, rhetorical phrases, seemingly original and unconventional at first glance, nasty stuff I would say. Or at least nasty for me.

But maybe I'm exaggerating, perhaps partly because of Pier Paolo. Reading, noticing more or less these things, or imagining them like a visionary (sorry Pier), I didn't feel like vomiting, I just felt a little annoyance, so, and nothing more. All in all, I was entertained.

Then I discovered the enormous importance that this particular novel and this particular author seem to have acquired over the years, and indeed right from the start considered, the novel and the author, as indispensable in 20th-century literature..

Damn, I told myself.

Not that it matters much to me or has much to do with my life, or existence, or survival, but damn all the same.