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A review by katmystery
Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez
2.0
When it takes me over two years to get through a 350 page book, there is something seriously wrong.
My first attempt at reading GGM was Love in the Time of Cholera, which I DNF'd halfway through. I tried again with this collection. There were a handful of stories in here that I found beautiful and haunting, my favorite being The Sea of Lost Time, but the rest left much to be desired. Most stories were dull at best, and some were downright disturbing.
GGM's writing, on the sentence level, is undeniably beautiful- the descriptions are evocative, the ambiance is strong, and the magic is folded effortlessly into the real-world setting. However, the characters are all the same- there are three or four character types that GGM uses religiously, making no one memorable or unique from the others- and, moreover, none of these character types are likable. Though I'm sure there were metaphors baked into the stories, I didn't grasp the grand majority of them.
While fantasy amplifies universal concepts (e.g. nature, love, power), magical realism distorts reality to give a voice to the everyday and mundane in all of its beautiful, brutal glory. As such, it is more focused on painting concepts with metaphors and allegory and making you think, rather than following a clear plot. I see the allure of this, but it's not my thing.
My first attempt at reading GGM was Love in the Time of Cholera, which I DNF'd halfway through. I tried again with this collection. There were a handful of stories in here that I found beautiful and haunting, my favorite being The Sea of Lost Time, but the rest left much to be desired. Most stories were dull at best, and some were downright disturbing.
GGM's writing, on the sentence level, is undeniably beautiful- the descriptions are evocative, the ambiance is strong, and the magic is folded effortlessly into the real-world setting. However, the characters are all the same- there are three or four character types that GGM uses religiously, making no one memorable or unique from the others- and, moreover, none of these character types are likable. Though I'm sure there were metaphors baked into the stories, I didn't grasp the grand majority of them.
While fantasy amplifies universal concepts (e.g. nature, love, power), magical realism distorts reality to give a voice to the everyday and mundane in all of its beautiful, brutal glory. As such, it is more focused on painting concepts with metaphors and allegory and making you think, rather than following a clear plot. I see the allure of this, but it's not my thing.