In high school I carried around a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude but I wasn’t able to read it until much later.
Magical realism wasn’t something a suburban Indiana teenager could handle. Later I read it and it changed the way I knew I could right – not that I did anything about it. I was still under the spell of Hemingway and the like. But I was slowly growing and I think now I’ve fully loosened Papa’s grasp.
So now my second Marquez novel. And there is almost no dialogue. He’s taken the “Show, don’t tell” dictum and thrown it out the window.
And I’m loving it so far. Marquez is teaching me again.
