REVIEW: Book rich with timeless themes
The first day of 2008, I read “The Secret Life of Bees.” The second day, I started reading “The Chronicles of Narnia” for the first time. I continued at this pace, reading from a list of books I thought I should eventually get through, until I had read 183 books – one for every two days of the year.
Almost all the books I count among my favorites are the books I can hardly help but read, the books I devour in one sitting because I absolutely cannot put them down, cannot tear my eyes from the pages. “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, isn’t like that.
When I was reading at record pace, I was working as a nanny full-time in Pennsylvania, without the time constraints of school or jobs or extracurricular activities. Marquez’s Nobel-prize winning masterpiece was the first book I read when I returned to Logan in January 2009 to finish college.
It took me about three months of reading, re-reading and deep thinking to finally put it back on the shelf, completed, and I count it among the most influential and meaningful books I have read.
“One Hundred Years” explores many themes, two of the most prevalent for me being time and solitude. The 400-page-plus novel winds through 100 years in the South American village of Macondo and the descendants if its founder, Jose Arcadio Buendia. Through times of war and peace, the village inhabitants live with the ups and downs of love, sex, crime, spirituality and the supernatural as they try to grasp onto that period between birth and death. There is a contrast between those seeking solitude and those trying to escape it.
As I end my college career and graduate this year, along with many of you, time and solitude and the choices we make between birth and death are a subject of much reflection.
The time I spent away from school, across the country, after my freshman year was a great lesson in solitude.
I didn’t have tangible access to friends or much opportunity to make new ones. I went to a lot of movies by myself, which I still enjoy, and did a lot of reading. I learned a lot about myself, and what I took away from it was a desire to continue to learn about myself, in solitude and in relation to other people. These relationships are a major focus in “100 years,”
And many characters experience poignant losses – of their spouse, lover or friend, of their solitude or peace of mind – and cope in drastically different ways. Many of us cope with our own losses – of the way of life we’ve known for the last several years, of people or places – in different ways, but one of the things that has stuck with me for years since reading this book is the importance of how we use the time we have. The novel could be described as having two opposing theories on time: A linear, chronological outlook and a cyclic, history-repeats-itself outlook.
Whichever theme you prefer to explore or live by, are you making time for yourself and for the people and things that mean the most to you? We live in a time where war is all over the world and of relative peace in our own communities. Do we appreciate and take advantage of that?
The reason this book took me so long to read was because every single word is worth reading, worth contemplating. It’s not just about the story being told but about the gems of wisdom within it. One critic said reading the book is like “aesthetic battle fatigue” because “every page is rammed full of life beyond the capacity of any single reader to absorb.”
I agree 100 percent, but would argue that this is a strength. I probably need to read the book a couple more times to extract everything that can be of value to me. As the critic, Harold Bloom, said, “There are no wasted sentences, no mere transitions, in this novel, and you must notice everything at the moment you read it.”
The books that win awards, be it the Newbery medal or the Novel literature prize, win them for a reason. Take the time to compile a list of the books you feel compelled to read – eventually – and work through them at your own pace. Maybe it’s a a list of five, maybe it’s a list of 500. Make use of your time, your solitude and your local library, and make a habit of noticing everything the moment you read – or hear, or see – it.
– Chelsey Gensel enjoys science fiction, young adult and classic novels with a long list of favorites. Her column appears monthly. Comments and questions can be sent to chelsey.gensel@aggiemail.usu.edu.