Eclectica Magazine published my my story “My Sister’s Labyrinth” today. It’s a companion story to “The Opal Maker” published by The Collagist and which was a finalist for Eckleburg Review’s Franz Kafka prize, and was also listed as one 2015’s top 50 by Wigleaf.I like to imagine that this woman, after leaving her first sister’s house, decided to go in search of her other siblings and came to her other sister’s house.
Eclectica has been publishing online for 21 years and publishes “outstanding writing” that “doesn’t fit” into easy categories.” They pride themselves on being one of the “longest-running and most consistent literary ezines on the web.” I’m honored to be part of this issue. They also published my story, “Death’s Debut” in 2014.
I think I also mentioned somewhere else that my hand bound chapbook Strange Appetites won the Adirondack Center for Writing’s People’s Choice Award for book of the year.
Also, the charming Hillview Free Library at Diamond Point, NY, invited me to present “Two Paths to Writing Your Life: The Magical and the Real” on August 23, 7-9. I’ll read excerpts from two stories that used to be one and are both (very) loosely based on my life, “Hitting the Wall” and “The Gatekeeper’s Mistake,” in order to illuminate the uses of magical realism as well as the writing process. Powerpoint will be included and the lecture is open to the public.
Finally, I’ll be presenting a lecture at SUNY Adirondack’s Continuing Education Lecture and Lunch series for seniors, “Ecuadorian Literature,” on September 19, 2017, 11:30 – 12:45pm at the Scoville Auditorium on the main campus. While there’s a small fee for the day of lectures and the lunch, I believe the lecture itself is open to the public.
When I grabbed Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude off the shelf to re-read, I didn’t realize it was the 50th anniversary. Stifling my academic urge to write a long literary analysis, I’ll just tell you a few things that struck me the second and third time through.
There’s very little dialogue in the novel. It’s almost all narration, more like a vivid summary rather than a series of scenes. He’s taking a leaf from his grandmother’s storytelling oral tradition, in which the beauty of the story is in its shape rather than the individual characters’ progress. Add to this the narrative’s digressive tendency and spiraling treatment of time, and you get transported.
The narrative describes event after event, covering years in a paragraph, pausing to provide half a scene, then galloping twenty years into the future, then spiraling back to whatever the present was, and twirling off in a different direction following another character’s trajectory. Sometimes, he’ll be talking about one character and he’ll digress into other character’s life and follow them up to their death, then return to the original time period, but not necessarily the original character, and then follow the line of another character, like he’s tracing the branches of an enormous tree, which of course he is, the Buendía family tree.
He doesn’t use the past perfect tense to make clear when he’s going into flashback, or the subjective tense to flash forward, or any other signal when he returns to the main time period, as the famous first sentence exemplifies, encompassing three time periods, the first of which is never clarified: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aurelian Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice” (1). It isn’t until the middle of the book that we get to the rest of the firing squad story, and then it’s almost a side note.
This tendency casts the reader awash in time, and develops the novel’s theme of time’s circularity and stagnant pockets, much like the mythical book Jorge Louis Borges wrote about in “The Garden of Forking Paths.”
The novel traces 100 years in the town of Macondo, from its founding by the Buendía family, through 32 civil wars lead by Colonel Buendía, through the arrival of capitalist enterprises in the form of the banana company with the attendant immigration of white foreigners, prostitutes and gamblers. The arrival of the capitalists culminates in a massacre of thousands of labor union protestors which the government hushes up. Then the town is washed away by “four years, eleven months and two days” (320) of rain, ending in the wildly decadent but transcendently pure lovemaking of the last Aureliano with his own aunt.
Having just recently traveled to Ecuador and studied Ecuador’s history and modern novels, I see better how the absurdity and circularity of the novel is shaped by Colombia and South America’s history.
Just like Ecuador, Colombia was invaded by the Spaniards who imposed an oppressive feudal system on the indigenous people, and it was both oppressed and liberated by the Catholic church. While Ecuador had 17 different constitutions since its independence, Colombia had nine civil wars between its independence from Spain in 1810 and 1850. Then there was the war of 1000 days from 1899-1903 in which 120,000 were killed, and then another civil war, “La Violencia” between 1848 and 1957 in which another 300,000 were killed, all between the liberals and conservatives (Britannica).
This is what much of the novel is about, and perhaps explains the theme of solitude that is the clear center of the book, though I must confess I don’t quite understand how. In what way is/was Columbia any more cut off from the world than any other Latin American country? Was he implying that Columbia is somehow more inbred and isolated than most countries? Is the rise and fall of Macondo an analogy for the whole country or just for Columbia’s rural past? Or just a certain kind of family? Why does he say that the Buendías were a “race…condemned to one hundred years of solitude” with “no second opportunity on earth?”
Though there are characters in this novel, they keep repeating, as do their names, so there are many Aurelian’s and José Arcadios, and after a while they all get mixed up in your mind, underscoring the circularity of time.
I love the character of “active, small and indomitable” Úrsula, Colonel Aureliano Buendía’s mother, who lives to be more than 100, running the household and family business until she is blind. I love the story Remedios the Beauty, who ascends bodily to heaven, and I love Úrsula’s great granddaughter Amaranta Úrsula who has a genius “for erotic mischief” and arrives home from Europe “leading her husband by a silk rope tied around his neck” and who shouts with laughter rather than alarm when she finds the family home is total chaos.
Though I can’t pretend to grasp it all, I adore this novel because of the whimsical blend of history, farce, passion, and magic typified in this winding sentence: “Jose Arcadio Buendía…gathered the men of the village… and he demonstrated to them, with theories that none of them could understand, the possibility of returning to where one had set out by consistently sailing east. The whole village was convinced that Jose Arcadio Buendía had lost his reason, when Melquíades [the traveling gypsy] returned to set things straight. He gave public praise to the intelligence of a man who from pure astronomical speculation had evolved a theory that had already been proved in practice, although unknown, in Macondo until then…” (5).
I think I’ll have to read it again.
Gabriel García Márquez. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Harper and Row. 1970.
I never afford myself enough time to read. Yet it’s integral to good writing. Guilty confession? Netflix is my nightly addiction.
However, when you truly give into an addiction for a good 25 years, it finally gets boring. I noticed this when I began to eat while watching… clearly the watching experience just wasn’t filling me up, so I was seeking other ways to connect.
So, why do I persistently resist reading when my bed is surrounded by stacks of books that I genuinely want to read? I often buy a book thinking I’m buying the time and dedication to read it also. During the school year, I need most of my time to read for school, but I have no excuse for not reading in the summer. Actually, I have a long list of excuses.
First of all, reading is harder work than watching. The eye muscles have to do a complex activity of focusing, tracking, converging and using peripheral vision. The brain has to do a complex decoding process, then you have to create the images yourself, all the while managing your inner dialogue in response to the reading.
For some people, this process has become so rote that they don’t even notice they are doing it, like the way you can touch-type without knowing where the letters are on the keyboard, or shift gears in a car without thinking, or feed the cat and forget you did it.
For others, there is a cognitive or eye muscle coordination glitch somewhere along the complex process that creates a hardship of varying sizes. I suspect I have a slight eye muscle glitch, so that I have to apply myself and reapply myself whereas my avid reader friends do not. For others, it can be an information processing issue or a slight or severe dyslexia. It’s important to note that dyslexia is a developmental issue that can be corrected over time.
Then there’s the problem of focus. If all goes well, you get into a dialogue with the thing you are reading, but that can take you a million miles away. Fifteen minutes later, you find yourself in the middle of a paragraph you thought you were reading but totally failed to absorb. You have to backtrack to figure out where your mind trailed off.
Then there’s emotional reactions. Sometimes, you decide you don’t like the author or the main character, and that makes you angry at the book, unwilling to slog through and glean what you can or figure out what it’s really saying.
Then there’s the problem of a physical reading position. Reading in bed sends me to sleep, and I’m always amazed at people who sit in straight chairs and read with head bowed. Add to that, I’m a naturally fidgety person, and sitting still too long literally hurts my bones.
I think the biggest problem, however, is that I unconsciously regard reading as wasting time. I don’t know where I developed that idea, coming from a family of two English professors who read constantly. I worry about reading taking over my writing time. But we all know that reading is essential for life – for being a responsible citizen of the United States, and for writers especially, to learn how others have done it, to enrich our creativity pool, and to avoid cliché.
So yesterday, taking a page from my mother’s book (I’ve taken a lot of her pages from her book), I set up one of those zero gravity chairs in the backyard. Feet raised, back raised, head supported, I pulled out One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I enjoyed every minute of it. When I needed to take a break and rest my eyes or brain, I’d stretch my neck and look up at the teardrop birch leaves or cast my eyes over daisies and purple cone flowers.
I have been re-reading One Hundred Years over the past month. I have a copy on Audible that I listen to while driving or walking the dog, and then at night, when I pull out the physical book, I have to reread passages to find my place, discovering I’d missed things while I was listening. The next day, I’d re-listen to passages to find my place in the recording, and in doing so, I pick up all the things I missed while reading it on the page. It’s a great way to read the book twice as you go, which helps with keeping things straight, perceiving patterns, and remembering.
The sun faded from the sky as I read last night, and my cats came to sit quietly around me, one underneath my chair, and the other nosing the flowers and contemplating a blade of grass. My dog appeared beside me, and I calmed her whenever she began to bark. A slight breeze stirred the humid air, the last Aureliano made crazy silent love to a woman he later found was his aunt while the world of Macondo whirled into oblivion.
Even after the sun went down and I came inside, I had the satisfying feeling that I had done something deeply beautiful for the last few hours.
The Black Warrior Review Fiction/Prose contest winner “Videoteca Fin del Mundo” by Ava Tomasula y Garcia is a difficult but rare read.
On first read, the story—or essay—felt incomprehensible, but as I forged ahead, the gist of the piece became clear: she is talking about how terrible things go on every day all around us, specifically the abuse of migrant workers who are then swept up into deportation centers, and how the “intolerable” becomes tolerable in our every day life, and how that fact is intolerable.
She’s saying that when we really think about it, the way this country uses, abuses, dehumanizes, and discards migrant workers is an ongoing apocalyptic disaster movie that we all sort of accept it as an every day thing as we, enjoy our “hot water, [our] clean air, [our] free right of movement, [our] microwave, [our] strawberry jam on bread this morning” (9).
She raises the question of how some of us want the impossible, a world without borders, while others of us see that as the apocalypse. She suggests that wishing for a world without borders is contradictory, since it’s akin to being “anti-systemic,” (14) and the system of the body is what keeps us alive. As impossible as a world without borders is, she contends, it’s the kind of world world that the very rich enjoy, so it’s not so impossible, after all (15).
If you want to read it, you have to purchase it the magazine, but a great interview with her is published here.
Is this a story? No. The narrator has a problem, but it’s an abstract problem about the “dissonance of the everyday” (9). The first four paragraphs are all meditation and no action, something any fiction writing workshop would tell you not to do.
The only action that occurs is in the fifth paragraph when the narrator wades “through strawberry hydroponics fields” (11). There is some action in relating facts about how undocumented works spray strawberry crops with “fourteen million pounds of pesticides a year,” and how migrant workers emerge out of “poisonous cloud[s] of gas that that was “used to kill people in World War I” (10). It’s footnoted. These are facts. Not fiction.
As always, when I read a difficult text, I am thrown into a decades-old meta debate.
What is the purpose of writing difficult texts? How difficult is too difficult? Does the writer know how difficult this is? Do I want to write like this? Should I? Do I want to work this hard to read this? Should I?
Also, why did these editors publish this as a piece of fiction? It reads more like an Avant-garde non-fiction essay. It’s the contest winner for the fiction/prose category, and it is, after all a work of prose. But they have a nonfiction category. Why didn’t they give it the award for non-fiction?
Obviously, they published it because that’s the kind of magazine they are. They like densely written, thought-provoking work that pushes on the boundaries of form. All of their stories, essays and poetry isn’t this difficult, as in the case of Scott Fenton’s “Possible Origin Stories for an Aspiring Boy Wonder,” which is just that, a series of paragraph-long origin stories. It’s playful and accessible on the surface, but yields more with each pass, which is my preferred reading mode.
But reading Tomasula y Garcia’s story/essay is a much different experience than reading this blog post. The hard work of tracking her words creates a certain pleasure, a certain convergence of many thoughts in a single blow that when unpacked at the same time, transport you to a new, dreamy, nightmarish, soulful place.
Flannery O’Connor once said, you write a story to say something you couldn’t say any other way.
In the end, Ava Tomasula y Garcia wrote her essay/story this way because she wanted readers to experience it in just that way and no other, a devastating and beautiful meditation that might wake us from a nightmare long enough to do something about it.
When I grabbed Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude off the shelf to re-read, I didn’t realize it was the 50th anniversary. Stifling my academic urge to write a long literary analysis, I’ll just tell you a few things that struck me the second and third time through.
Though there are characters in this novel, they keep repeating, as do their names, so there are many Aurelian’s and José Arcadios, and after a while they all get mixed up in your mind, underscoring the circularity of time.
I never afford myself enough time to read. Yet it’s integral to good writing. Guilty confession? Netflix is my nightly addiction.
The Black Warrior Review