One Hundred Years of Solitude
Be careful about applying class issues to Garcia Marquez' Nobel speech too broadly. Those ideas are present but are definitely not the primary point.
Ex-Cred: Examples of the extraordinary.
And, in case you have a bit of JM Pride and competitive spirit, please link this blog to your websites. The current web logs out there are pitiful and ours should be at the top!
posted by erdecker @ 3:06 PM
9 comments
9 Comments:
extraordinary: ice as the greatest invention ever. all the stuff that the gypsy guy (Melquíades...by the way i should get mega e.c. for just accenting that i right there...) had gone through (pellagra, scurvy, bubonic plague, earthquake, shipwreck). all the different ways and inventions José Arcadio wasted away úrsula's money. etc. the list goes on.
The adventures of Candide- the amazing coincedences that happen to him, Pangloss' undying optimism and especially his experience in El Dorado.
So this is a really late comment but I haven't been on the blog forever. I was just reading and in the beginning of Chapter six, it talks about all that how Colonel Aureliano Buendia "survived 14 attempts on his life, 73 ambushes, and a firing squad. That seems a bit extraordinary to me. And there are a lot of things in this book that aren't necessarily "extraordinary" but just unbelievable. Like that Amaranta would just let Pietro Crispi die like that. I mean she didnt know that he was going to kill himself but before she had been willing to kill her own sister for him. And now when he is expressing his love so profusely, nothing! So yea, slightly unbelievable/extraordinaryish.
*It takes 20 men to subdue JAB?! He must have some extraordinary strength powers.
*There is a priest who can levitate himself by using chocolate!
*Jypsies have a magical flying carpet, which seems to have the same characteristics as the one depicted in "Aladdin."
I think the fact that many of the Buendias know exactly when they are going to die is extraordinary. Ursula and Amaranta both know when they are going to die. Some other extraordinary things are the yellow butterflies that seem to follow Mauricio, the mysterious rising up of Remedios, the inability of the people to see Jose Arcadio Segundo when he is in Melquiades shop(". . .also realized that the soldier was looking at him without seeing him"(pg 335), and the death of three thousand people without anyone in town noticing.("There haven't been any dead here, she said"(pg 331). All of these things are quite extraordinary happenings that happen throughout this book.
-Jessica Steiger
Extraordinary throughout the novel. Aureliano Segundo and Jose Arcadio Segundo dying at the same time. CAB being the only, for a long time anyways, to see how dirty Melquiades room was. The rain that fell on Macondo for four years, eleven months, and two days. But then, no rain for ten years. How Macondo went through the whole invasion of the Banana Company and industrialization but then began to revert back to the origins of the town. The fortune of Aureliano Segundo and Petra Cotes with the overabundance of animals and good fertility of the animals. The fact that Ursula, Pilar Tenera, and possibly others have lived to be over a hundred, (Ursula between 115-122) is extraordinary in itself. Meme being able to love Mauricio also seems extraordinary because it seems as no Buendia has been capable of loving someone or at least sustaining that love.
-Cassandra
Another example of extraordinary in the novel: "...four of the children went into the room one morning while Aureliano was in the kitchen, preparing to destroy the parchments. But as soon as they laid hands on the yellowed sheets an angelic force lifted them off the ground and held them suspended in the air until Aureliano returned and took the parchments away from them." I've never known that to happen in real life...
Cassandra
"By then Melquiades had aged with surprising rapidity. On his first trips he seemed to be the same age as JOse Arcadio Buendia. But while the latter had preserved his extraordinary strength, which permitted him to pull down a horse by grabbing its ears, the gypsy seemed to have been worn down by some tenacious illness." JAB's extraordinary strength....
Cassandra
Perhaps not extraordinary, but definitely not normal
The extreme regression of the town of Macondo, so when the third generation of gypsies comes through, it's as if it's the first time with Jose Arcadio Buendia and Melquiades all over again
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