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Simcha-Sophie
a lovely mishmash of opinions interspersed with moments of clarity and vision by a vegan lesbian feminist mystery-loving, history-loving reader and writer.
Currently reading
The More I Owe You: A Novel
The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World without Losing Your Way
Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (Between Men--Between Women)
The Healing Earth
Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come
Strange Pilgrims
I was torn between giving this two and three stars. The writing is, not surprisingly, seamless and makes the book easy to read. Not as much magical realism as I'd expected. Better than "100 Years of Solitude," which I did not care for.I think the last story is the most powerful; there is more characterization, more depth to the characters. Yet it's a highly male-centric book, with females as very secondary characters. Marquez is more interested in plumbing the depths, and showing/tracing the growth, of the male characters.
Also, reading from an animal-standpoint critique, it sucks to be an animal in Marquez's world: meat, meat, meat; and fur coats. Blah.
Anyway, this is obviously a really intense review or anything.
For what they are, I find most of the stories to be interesting, and what Marquez does with characters in such short stories is rather amazing: creates whole, full people in a matter of pages. But it's hard for me to read without the perspective of a feminist and a vegan, and that's where I find the majority of problems with Marquez.