Gabriel Garcia Marquez as crap?
Sacrilege of the first degree, I know, but Prem Rara thinks so. He describes One Hundred Years of Solitude as being " a good book but does not deserve your scarce free time."

I couldn't disagree more. In my opinion, the book is the best piece of literature to have been produced by the Third World in the twentieth century. Some, I know, would even hazard the opinion that it is the best piece of literature to have been produced in the twentieth century anywhere.

The opening pages are a little bit off-putting, true (despite the memorable opening sentence: Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.), but the divers stories within the novel are too interesting to miss after one hurdles the first chapter. I remember with great fondness the levitation of Remedios the Beauty with the flapping brabant sheets that rose up to heaven with her, the adolescent despot Buendia marching across town and lording it over during a civil war until his mother gave him a whipping, the horrific sight of the baby, the last of the Buendias, being dragged by the ants toward their holes, and, of course, the massacre at the train station during the banana plantation strike.

The book is one of my favorites. I learned from that book how history, far from being a rigid, objective and social scientific discipline, is actually a fluid, contentious and politically determined social artifact. The banana plantation massacre in the novel was ignored by history as if it never happened. The people thought Jose Arcadio Segundo was insane when he went around town telling tales of the execrable massacre of three thousand people. Garcia Marquez also portrayed in the book how do-gooding revolutionaries lose sight and forget the reasons for the revolution and continue fighting simply because of inertia and pride.

I strongly believe that Garcia Marquez would deserve a Nobel even if he had only written One Hundred Years of Solitude and nothing more. Too bad Rara didn't like it. Perhaps a re-reading is in order.