Wizarding School: Castelobruxo, Brazil
Prompt: Read a book that was translated into your language
Format: Audiobook (Libby – San Mateo Public Library)

If there was a book I would need a hundred years to understand, it is this. This book is the epitome of all thing brilliant, bizarre, deeply sad, and exhilarating at the same time.

I am almost certain that 90% of readers would dislike this book deeply enough to fling it out their windows and hope it is mauled by wolves and vultures. It is bat-shit crazy, to put it bluntly.

This was such a fantastic piece of writing that I am reeling from the simple act of having read it. It is impossible for one person to ever understand this book in its entirety, and it is with a grin, shake of my head, and pure awe, that I am writing this review.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Colombian author who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. This book was written in 1967, first in Spanish, and then translated into 37 languages, one of which is Tamil – my native language – and called Thanimyin Nooru Andugal by N. Sukumaran (2012).

This is a story of seven generations of the Buendia family, in a fictional town called Macondo, in Colombia. Jose Arcadio Buendia, visionary and founder of Macondo, is the primary protagonist (for the lack of a better term for him) who wants his family to live and thrive in the magical town, isolated form the rest of the world. And crazy things happen here (huge understatement). Making goldfish obsessively in the machine shop, eating dirt, spreading contagious insomnia all through the town and then losing memory collectively, often coming back from the dead, spewing cockroaches from your ribs, getting launched into the sky by your own laundry, splashing toilet water on your son so you can find him in the dark, giving birth to 17 illegitimate children and naming them all after you, shrinking to the size of a raisin, experiencing rain that lasts for decades, of course sleeping with your siblings and aunts, and finally ending up with a child with a pig’s tail, are all pretty common in Macondo.

And all of this set in the backdrop of a contorted version of what happened in Colombia in the early 1920s is just so wicked and brilliant, that I am now out of adjectives. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I feel the need to write his full name every time since he does that too in the book – the full names of all the characters every time he mentions them, maybe since they are all somehow named the same?) talks about political standings, the cruel, brutal, unending wars between the Liberals and Conservatives, the colonialism and invasion by the British and Europeans, and the Banana Massacre, all so vividly and crazily explained in “magical realism”.

I have never read a book with sentences as long as a day, and I am sure from now on, any other writing will sound childishly simple to me. I am not even going to pretend I understood this book completely, and I will certainly not believe anyone who says they do.

This is a must read for anyone who is looking for literary extravaganza, anyone who is looking to physically feel the power of writing, and anyone who enjoys the crash of words and worlds in their brain when they read. This is the “I Am The Walrus” of books!

My Rating: ***** (5/5)