Exercise - An Incomplete Book Review

I want to write so much more and yet I am unable to find the words. So here is one more of my incomplete exhausting attempts.

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Reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude is like chasing a blinding beam of light to its source. It hurts the eye at first, so painful that I wanted to fling the book away and never look at it again. Isolation is what Marquez achieves in the first few pages. Languidly, swirling in and out of the Buendia family's first generation, he reduces the world to the nauseatingly hot Maconda and the Buendia family home, until the reader is on a merry-go-around, images fleeing past the eye in a frenzy, unstoppable, powerful and inexplicably inseparable from the images within one's own brain. Maconda, silent brooding, watches the founding family as they grapple with fate. Within the reality of Macondo anything is possible - flying carpets, a damsel ascending the heavens along with the bedsheets, conversations with ghosts, clouds of yellow flowers, a train of corpses - and therein lies the genius of Marquez, in making the absurdities and caricatures fit in so naturally with the landscape that the latter would look incomplete without them. Years of drought gives way to four and half years of relentless rain, so much so that when the flood recedes, the town is unrecognizable with dead animals and deserted houses. The rain gives way to ten years of dust and drought. Seasons come and go as do the generations. History repeats itself, from thirty two civil wars to midnight revelry. Sacred manuscripts are guarded by the ghost of Melquiadas as the heirs of the family, one per generation, try to decipher their fate coded in sanskrit scribbled like crow's feet. Amaranta spinns her funeral shroud under the watchful eyes of Death, Meme waits, naked and ready, for her lover - the one with the halo of yellow butterflies - when she hears the pistol shot that at once kills him and brands him a chicken thief and continues waiting for ever. Remedios The Beauty lunches at three am and kills scorpions to kill time. Fernanda corresponds with the invisible doctors about the miracle cure for her mysterious tumour - a telepathic operation. The characters and larger than life events mimic a splash of colours, twisted within and without each other. The generations of Aureliano's and Jose's, doomed to one hundred years of solitude, are as different from each other as their names are identical.