by John Irving
Update: We are going to read Jose Saramago's Blindness for our next book this summer. We will read the entire book, for discussion on Wednesday, July 18. We'll read an article for the next week, July 11.
The schedule for the next few weeks and readings is located here .
The article I mentioned about magical reaslism and One Hundred Years of Solitude can be found here .
without our even having to stretch out our arms, the flood of books
spilled out of the print room and knocked down the first arrivals at
the presses, who succumbed deliriously to that terrible deluge of
narrative as it covered the streets and the sidewalks and rose lap-high
in the ground-floor rooms of all the houses for miles around, so that
there was no one who could escape from that story, if you were blind or
shut your eyes it did you no good because there were always voices
reading aloud within earshot, we had all been ravished like willing
virgins by that tale, which had the quality of convincing each reader
that it was his personal autobiography; and then the book filled up our
country and headed out to sea, and we understood in the insanity of our
possession that the phenomenon would not cease until the entire surface
of the globe had been covered, until seas, mountains, underground
railways and deserts had been completely clogged up by the endless
copies emerging from the bewitched printing press, with the exception,
as Melquiades the gypsy told us, of a single northern country called
Britain whose inhabitants had long ago become immune to the book
disease, no matter how virulent the strain….
We are meeting to discuss the second half of One Hundred Years of Solitude Thursday night at 7:30, in the usual location.
Our next book will be Jose Saramago's Blindness.
For Wednesday's discussion group, we will be reading to page 200 of One Hundred Years of Solitude, rather than the whole book. I hope to see a lot of you there.
If you are one of the people reading One Hundred Years of Solitude this summer, you might be interested in this article by Ilan Stavans, about the importance of OHYOS and the influence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
García Márquez, however, is its acknowledged fountainhead, and for good reason. At the beginning of One Hundred Years of Solitude,
Macondo is a small, nondescript town on the Caribbean coast of Colombia
(modeled after García Márquez's birthplace, Aracataca which, 40 years
after the novel's debut, is still a dusty place without running water).
In 20 symmetrical chapters, each made of approximately 20 dense pages,
a third-person narrator — is it Melquíades the Gypsy? — chronicles,
with frightening precision, the town's rise and fall, exploring its
geographical, temporal, ideological, and cultural dimensions. In spite
of the title, the narrative time spans more than a century.
