There have been hundreds of books that I have read in my lifetime. Some of them have left lasting impressions while some didn’t. There were some books which left impressions in parts and not as a whole. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude is one of them. The man writes brilliant no doubt. He did get a Nobel Prize for this too. But this book was very tenacious. I felt a hundred years old at the end of it. The story just wouldn’t end. What I discovered later on reading his other books is that they all have a similar theme and a similar sort of characters with similar afflictions, similar names, similar diseases, similar deaths, similar children and generations that wound about seamlessly through the books and made me feel restless as on a dry summer day, longing for an end. But of course, this is my opinion. As Literature, there’s no doubt that his pen painted rather than wrote. But as stories, they could have been more compact.
But I am digressing. This book, One Hundred Years of Solitude had a particular scene where one of the characters with a name that could be confused with a lot of other people in the book itself(but naming processes were such those days!), Jose Arcadio Segundo, is on a train. Even though the picture drawn in the words in the book is a disturbing one; somehow that picture got enhanced in my head to be officially disturbing and morbid to me. The following is the exact picture painted by the author:
“When José Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying face up in the darkness. He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached. He felt an intolerable desire to sleep. Prepared to sleep for many hours, safe from the terror and the horror, he made himself comfortable on the side that pained him less, and only then did he discover that he was lying against dead people. There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle. Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the corpses had the same temperature as plaster in autumn and the same consistency of petrified foam that it had. And those who had put them in the car had had time to pile them. He saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas.”
This exact scene has been embossed in my brain and can disturb me pretty much if it’s thought floats in. The level of detail in a few lines has had an impact that no other similar books could produce. But in my head, there are additions to it.
I imagine that the endless train is travelling on an endless track on an endless bridge over endless seas. The night is stormy and purple streaks of thunder ravage the clouds. The water rushes up to meet these streaks and collides in a fury. The water hits the train at intervals yet the train shrieks on through the purple night. Then comes the part written by the author in the picture.
Inside the train, there are dead bodies piled. All the dead bodies of the villagers massacred for no reason ,shoved and piled up without a hint of remorse. Every single villager is in the death heap. Their homes still stand strong and proud in remembrance of them, doors opened, waiting for their owners to return and flood it with humanity. An entire village wiped clean and heaped on a train to be dispersed off into a hungry sea. And in the midst of this foreboding picture there is man who is alive and breathing. I think this is the exact detail that makes my head reel.
Imagine yourself, alive and breathing in the picture painted above. With not a live soul around you. With nowhere to go. With no place to move. And cadavers all around. Take a deep breath and think of happy things now.
But I am digressing. This book, One Hundred Years of Solitude had a particular scene where one of the characters with a name that could be confused with a lot of other people in the book itself(but naming processes were such those days!), Jose Arcadio Segundo, is on a train. Even though the picture drawn in the words in the book is a disturbing one; somehow that picture got enhanced in my head to be officially disturbing and morbid to me. The following is the exact picture painted by the author:
“When José Arcadio Segundo came to he was lying face up in the darkness. He realized that he was riding on an endless and silent train and that his head was caked with dry blood and that all his bones ached. He felt an intolerable desire to sleep. Prepared to sleep for many hours, safe from the terror and the horror, he made himself comfortable on the side that pained him less, and only then did he discover that he was lying against dead people. There was no free space in the car except for an aisle in the middle. Several hours must have passed since the massacre because the corpses had the same temperature as plaster in autumn and the same consistency of petrified foam that it had. And those who had put them in the car had had time to pile them. He saw the man corpses, woman corpses, child corpses who would be thrown into the sea like rejected bananas.”
This exact scene has been embossed in my brain and can disturb me pretty much if it’s thought floats in. The level of detail in a few lines has had an impact that no other similar books could produce. But in my head, there are additions to it.
I imagine that the endless train is travelling on an endless track on an endless bridge over endless seas. The night is stormy and purple streaks of thunder ravage the clouds. The water rushes up to meet these streaks and collides in a fury. The water hits the train at intervals yet the train shrieks on through the purple night. Then comes the part written by the author in the picture.
Inside the train, there are dead bodies piled. All the dead bodies of the villagers massacred for no reason ,shoved and piled up without a hint of remorse. Every single villager is in the death heap. Their homes still stand strong and proud in remembrance of them, doors opened, waiting for their owners to return and flood it with humanity. An entire village wiped clean and heaped on a train to be dispersed off into a hungry sea. And in the midst of this foreboding picture there is man who is alive and breathing. I think this is the exact detail that makes my head reel.
Imagine yourself, alive and breathing in the picture painted above. With not a live soul around you. With nowhere to go. With no place to move. And cadavers all around. Take a deep breath and think of happy things now.
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