Why is this so good?

Why is this so good?

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Because it's a long-ass novel that hooks you right at the start with a kino opening sentence and then stays kino for the next 500 pages. Plus, its English translation is better than the original Spanish work according to Marquez himself.

It's essentially the national myth of Latin America. It manages to describe everything beautifully and is an allegory to Colombian history, albeit, from a rather leftie perspective.

>from a rather leftie perspective.
Hard to justify a massacre of workers from a right-wing perspective.

they were crypto-Jews, user

My impression when I read it was that I was witnessing humanity first emerging from primordial mud, from the creamy swamps of stone age, as if the foundation of the city of Macondo was the first settlement of civilization and it’s inhabitants were all Adams and Eves, all of them still humid with the sweat of the dew of paradise. Is like the children of Eden modeling and pilling up the first bricks of Ur, or Uruk, of Nineveh or Babylon (all the houses of red mud and of bamboo/taquara).

Humanity was at the same time more innocent and stronger, more ignorant and hungrier. The friendship and the butchery, the marriage and drinking rituals, the sexual hunger and the love caresses, the trades and crafts and arts and festivals: all of it seemed, in my eyes, as discovered for the first time by the inhabitants of the world of this book. When they made love, they did it with more power and pleasure than our current race; when they killed, they did it with more foaming savagery. Their veins still had primeval magma snaking and tingling inside them; their arteries still burned with an effervescence contaminated with the sweat of minotaur’s and the menstrual blood of sirens. It is a book that portrays a period in history but with the taste of something that came before history, before civilization, before the written word, before the invention of time. The first settlers, with the first house-foundations, will be the ones who will finally make time open its eyes and start growing conscious – as if, the soil being perforated to seat the first beams, time started to gush off, like newfound petroleum.

It begins with creation. Even the fauna and flora, with plants with tick and oozing blood of milk, flowers with golden pollen, butterflies and mosquitos emerging like dense fog, and the birds singing on the branches, the tamarins jumping from tree to tree, the fat salamanders crawling in the viscous vegetation, the araras (macaws) whose flesh is blue and taste like musk: this environment seemed as the original jungles of Eden before the fall of humanity. It begins with creation, but it will march inexorably until the crack of doom.

And then you get the same errors and weaknesses happening again and again and again, by generation after generation of characters, as if didn’t matter how much civilization changed, for the original and primeval world (where things still didn’t had a name, where men and women needed to point to indicate what they were referring to) could never be completely silenced. No matter how much technology and “progress” fertilized the world, still the original marrow of our bestial beings could never be suppressed: it kept screaming inside the bones and veins of the men and women of the book. Like the sweet and nauseating pulp of guava, there is no way to wash the taste, the nausea and the sweetness from this the people who are still and forever tattooed by the Dionysian stamp of the state-of-nature.

Gregory Rabassa was truly one of a kind. He translated some of the Latin American biggies like Paradiso and Hopscotch, as well.

Well I think it is middle of the road trash. Nothing ever happens! And whenever I post on Yea Forums that it sucks, everyone says "oh amigo, you must read in the original Spanish language".
Well fuck that and fuck you, because this doesn't even belong in a top 100 list of best lit in ANY language.

I know I'm probably missing the whole meaning of it because I'm a gringo, so apologies if I stalled on any toes.

*Stepped

Is that pasta from a review or did you write that? Because I would read a book like that as you described. I tried reading it maybe 10 years ago, I think maybe I'll try starting again.

>Nothing ever happens!
You can say anything you want about it but this critique makes no sense. Stuff literally happens in every page. This isn't an introspective novel.