Source: freepik.es
This activity of reading, seeks today to renew itself and gain followers, and even the habit of reading clubs is being retaken, which had declined a little by the technology issue, and these times of speed that surround us, but these circles of shared and comparative reading, allow us to connect with people around the world, and meet different books in a short period of time.
So if you are taking advantage of these times of relative calm, or resuming this new normality because of the covid 19 theme, I can recommend a book that will catch you from beginning to end, and that you may have already heard mentioned, such as "one hundred years of solitude" by the Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. I recommend this book with all propriety because I read it 20 years ago and to this day I remember it daily.
The narrative goes through the rise and fall of each generation, intertwined with the daily events of the town, its demographic growth, situations, policies and social outbursts, through which the author captured much of the reality of Colombia itself, in the years described in the temporal location of the story. Thus we see how the love stories of the main characters and their descendants are almost always affected by the situations of the historical context in which they unfold.
For those who have not read works of this great Colombian writer, who is the main reference of magical realism as a literary genre and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature for this masterpiece, you should know that his narrative mixes the divine and fantastic, with everyday events typical of literary history, a style that gives us an entertaining reading throughout the book. One of its characteristics is that the characters do not seem to be surprised by these unreal and sometimes fantastic events that happen to them, on the contrary, they are a logical part of their reality, which is projected to the reader.
For me, this book is a jewel that we should all read, its descriptions rich in smells, colors and history, as well as the unreal situations of love and loneliness of the Buendía family for a hundred years, have been one of the literary experiences that I treasure the most. I can tell you that there is a chapter that I always remember, in which the whole town fell victim to the virus of insomnia and forgetfulness, forcing the inhabitants of Macondo to find strategies to not forget the meaning of things, such as labeling everything with names and their uses, until they themselves forgot to read and that strategy became useless.
There are many passages in the book that I liked, but I mentioned the plague of insomnia and forgetfulness, because I think it fits a popular saying that I like very much: "things are silenced because they are known and forgotten because they are silenced", for me it is like the oblivion to which everything that is not expressed, that which is not transmitted and that which is not used is condemned to oblivion. I believe that this reference of the author, at least the personal interpretation that I make, is that of a powerful message. And it is valid for any situation, basically for the transmission and sharing of our academic or life knowledge, of experiences.