feedingbrett's reviews
187 reviews

Perhaps it is the nature of non-fiction literature that slowed my momentum of enduring through the entire book, with The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank being the only exception so far. That being said, Cornelius Ryan has created a historical document, but a document that traces itself like a novel - at least for the most part. Its narrative constant may be the war itself, the setting, and the constant progression of time, therefore characters come in and out of the chapters depending on their given relevance, but each moment feels informative, both historically and emotionally. Despite its length, one is aware whilst reading through that there are portions that Ryan has researched that have been omitted for the sake of pace and ease of absorption, and I don't blame him for it. Yet by the end, I was left even more curious on what more could be dug from the triumphant, tragic, and critical day that was June 6 1944.

There are some books that tap onto your mind, asking to be reviewed more intently with the aim of gathering more from the experience. However, Charles Portis' True Grit brings forth an experience that is both entertaining and thought-provoking, and most importantly, do so with effortless ease. Portis' storytelling evokes like a gentle breeze, you can feel it flowing and yet it doesn't always draw attention onto itself. Its blueprint consists of a plot with clear intentions of its overall goal and also a group of characters that are shaped by dialogue that pops out of the page with a sense of personality; one cannot say that Rooster, Mattie, LaBeouf, and Chaney feel like they are manufactured from the same cloth. I must say, there is a developed sense of affection I share for the story, despite its modest ambitions, an outcome that I cannot say was as effortlessly earned as it has with this.

Ford has ambitiously set out to expose more than just the yearnings of conflicted lovers, but rather unearth insight into the moral complexities that rationalise their motives and decisions. As it approaches this narrative through the eyes of an "involved party", Ford encourages us to question its bias, whether the shared insight into its story and characters are shaped by objective authenticity or whether the narrator himself has created a confessional to justify and reinforce his own means. Much like the characters themselves, the manner of its storytelling is a reflection of his own frailties to unfold this story, with Ford managing to reflect the zig-zag nature of thought recollection (which on its own managed to frustrate and intrigue me simultaneously). There was enough of its story that encouraged me to endure through it to the end, though Ford did make the process rather difficult with its choice of narration - despite its deliberateness - and I do wonder that now I am aware of how it all unfolds and my feelings towards its approach of telling it, whether that impression will change upon a subsequent read. Undoubtedly, there is a layer to this that I have yet to grasp and that lingering thought has always questioned my own initial response to this. However, how I currently feel is how it simply is.

I was not prepared for the seemingly effortless flow and vividness of Gabriel García Márquez's writing. In this journey through the family tree of the Buendias, we are treated through a trail of political turmoil, obsessive pursuits of knowledge, incestuous entanglements, mythological fears and forecasts, and perseverance and preservation of lineage. There is rarely anything in its dense chapters that is dull or useless, as each passing moment feels like an opportunity of insight into a family that demonstrates more similarities to one another as their generational gap may suggest.

That flow that I had previously mentioned is what entrenched me into its chapters as Marquez uses the power of words to travel us through each family member's various experiences. The effortless flow allows the story to move from one character to another, from one time period to the next (at times not even through a chronological fashion), as a form of recognition of the significance of a moment from an individual level and a communal one, and also the emphasising the insight that we gain on an objective fact would consistently morph based on the accumulated information shared by its astute and loving narrator. It always feels like I am learning something new and perhaps this is attributed to the feeling that Marquez himself feels like he is also learning something new as these characters unfold.

Due to its overall density, there is still so much to take in, and not everything could be retained from a single sitting. Much like looking at the size of the book itself, the depth of this novel felt more like the span of a towering forest than an expansive field. We are encouraged to look vertically into these characters, their history and the interconnectedness of it all, whilst also horizontally through the events that are taking shape within the Buendia home and all of Macondo, which both reveal themselves to be key characters to the overall narrative.

However, it was also that density that withheld me from showering this with a perfect score. I feel that there is still so much that I have missed in its intricate details that a full appraisal still feels half-baked for me. I may have powered through One Hundred Years of Solitude within a few days and each passing moment was just as vivid as it was when I first picked it up, but I knew that what I held inside my mind was still an abstraction of the Buendias. It would be quite a task to have absorbed and understood over 100 years of a family's life within a span of a few days.