49. Gabriel García Márquez - Leaf Storm

Let's ignore the fact that I'm a few days late writing this blog. This week I've read another one of Gabriel García Márquez' books, this time Leaf Storm and I have to say that I think this book is very comparable to No One Writes to the Colonel in that it is just as bad.

After reading it, and it is only a short book, I cannot tell you what it is about. I can give it a try though. It starts with three people who bury a man; a grandfather, his daughter and her child. We change narrative about every page and we get pieces of the dead man's (a doctor) history. He arrived into a quiet town with a banana company, which turns the whole town upside down. After the company leaves, however, it takes the whole character and life out of the city and out of the man. The grandfather seems to want to fulfil a promise he made to the doctor and he is set on burying him, however the rest of the town detests the doctor.

I don't really understand why all this happens. And what I found especially odd was that sometimes the narrative echoes itself. In about six sentences Márquez uses the same phrase a character has said, as if he had never written that before. There are a lot of reasons why I don't like this book, but it's not necessary to get into further detail. Let's just forgive and forget, because at the moment Márquez has written more good novels than bad ones. 

48. Gabriel García Márquez - Of Love and Other Demons

Gabriel García Márquez managed to make me keep on reading with Of Love and Other Demons. I have reviewed a lot of his books already (although I have quite a lot more to go), and you know that I'm not sure I like him. However, this story again was very good and managed to keep my eyes glued to the pages. I think it might be either love or hate with his books. 

Of Love and Other Demons is about the Marquis' daughter Sierva Maria, who one day is bitten by a dog. This dog later turns out to have rabies. The Marquis who wasn't close to his daughter since she was born and made her live with the slaves in the shed, suddenly realises the error of his ways and he contacts a Jewish doctor. The doctor tells him that if the girl is healthy, she will be fine, but the Marquis doesn't trust it and he turns to the Bishop who in turn advises the Marquis to put his daughter in a cloister because she might be possessed by a demon. It's up to a young priest to exorcise the girl, but he first has to determine if she might be sane after all. And that's where the love in the title comes in...

It was a good story, up until the end when it was suddenly over. The built up was much longer than the conclusion and that doesn't go well with the story. Apart from that it is an amusing tale, but it wasn't as good as Chronicle of a Death Foretold. 

47. Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

On the cover of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory it says that this is a Gothic horror story. Since my MA was mostly about Gothic horror I was very surprised to see that most of the book is about torturing animals. However, halfway through the book Banks uses the word uncanny, and we all know that when that word is used it can't be anything but a Gothic novel:

"(..) I saw in the gathering night strange lights, shifting in the air over and far beyond the island. They wavered and moved uncannily, glinting and shifting and burning in a heavy, solid way no thing should in the air. I stood and watched them for a while, training my binoculars on them and seeming, now and again in the shifting images of light, to discern structures around them. A chill passed through me then and my mind raced to reason out what I was seeing." (Banks 109)

This is about as Gothic a passage as one would write and that's when I suddenly understood that this book can indeed be seen as a Gothic horror novel.

It's about Frank and his father on a small island in Scotland. Frank has not been registered and does not have any financial documentation, therefore he has to keep himself to himself. That's what he does. He collects animal skeletons and he has a wasp factory, which in an incongruous way dictates his decisions. However, Frank has already killed three people, but he managed to hide this fact very well. Frank's brother Eric has escaped from the asylum and he is making his way back to the island to Frank and his father's fears because Eric tends to leave a trail of burnt dogs behind him.

It's a good story and the ending is very unique. I was happily surprised by the way the story is told, it kind of reminds me of Lord of the Flies. I have never read Iain Banks SciFi novels, but his first normal fiction novel is really good. Uncannily good even...

46. Sebastian Junger - The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea

At first I found Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea completely unreadable. If you know the film with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg and if you love that story, you wouldn't like this book. The book is basically a guesstimate of what happens on board the Andrea Gail and what happens around it, but mostly it describes the weather conditions and the way hurricanes are formed. 

This is an example of something from the book that really annoys me, because it's such a random description of the events:

"Every hour, perhaps, Billy might get hit by a breaking fifty-footer. That's probably the kind of wave that blew out the windows. And every 100 hours, Billy can expect to run into a non-negotiable wave (...) Billy's undoubtedly working too hard at the helm to give drowning much thought." (Junger 127)

This is basically a description of what could be happening on board the ship when the hurricane reaches it. However, the perhapses and the probablies outweigh the story. And what annoys me most is that it says that a wave blew out the windows; this is not a known fact. He is guessing, but at the same time he is perhapsing and probablying all over the place in that same sentence.

I didn't like the book until I reached page 160. When Junger starts describing other events that take place during the same storm. When the people who survive are able to tell the tale afterwards. That is quite interesting and that is something he should have centred his book around. Basing it on an event of a ship that sinks with no radio contact since before the storm, is a waste of what could have been a good story. In this instance I'd say film 1 - book 0.