Five Years of Solitude

This week I read One Hundred Years of Solitude once again. More than five years after my first time. And yet it was like a first time. I read it in three days and in those three days I could do nothing else. I was bound to my room and my brain was whizzing around in Macondo. The Jose Arcadios and  Aurelianos danced around me, in their fierce, weird madness and quiet strength. Ursula Iguaran sat in the corner, seeing me through her opaque eyes. And the four years of rain, and the many years of sunshine all went through me, like a flood.

Some pictures speak a thousand words. With Marquez, each word shatters into a thousand pictures. The mind is lost, wondering which way to take - this or that? There is no way to describe the sensory explosion that accompanies while you read Solitude. It is orgasmic, and sometimes beyond it. Every bit is precious. Marquez surprises us in the narrative, in the narration, the working of his characters, the lunacy of their thoughts and actions, the weather, the everyday regularity of miracles and the sudden surprises of reality. Time moves fast and slow as he pleases, and the world swivels around his thumb. Such letters!

Will such words be written again? Will a work of art move me ever so much? I wonder, I wait.