1. CLASSIC AND MAGICAL REALISM: A Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
I picked this book up right after I finished reading it in Spanish. I did this because I’d been hearing very good things about the translation, and I wanted to see for myself if they were true. They are. Gregory Rabassa’s translation to English of this novel is probably one of the best translations I’ve ever read. Second, I read this English edition back to back with the Spanish edition because I wanted to see how the translator wrote several passages that stood out to me in the Spanish edition. I wanted to see if they had the same impact. Some did, some didn’t. The choice of words in English wasn’t as impactful as in Spanish; an example is when Coronel Aureliano Buendía decides to become a Liberal and fight the Conservatives because they’re “tricky”, I found it a rather weak choice of word for the corresponding word “tramposos” in Spanish, which means that someone has cheated in order to get what they want or stay in power. And this is exactly what Aureliano’s father-in-law does during the elections.
This is my biggest complaint. Other than that, the translation is superb. I found it to be an accessible for anyone intimidated by magical realism, and an easy to read translation. I talk more about One Hundred Years of Solitude in my January Wrap Up.
2. FANTASY AND MYTHOLOGY: Galatea by Madeline Miller
I picked this book up (a short story, really) at the time when I had just read the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid doesn’t go too much into detail but when Pygmalion sets out to make the perfect woman out of stone, he is fresh out of several romantic disappointments and he is disillusioned with the women of his village. And this disillusionment leads him to withdraw from romantic pursuits and to channel all his energy into creating the perfect woman. He works to shape not just beauty, but his own vision of feminine perfection, one that would transcend what he perceived as the flaws of mortal women.
The myth itself is supposed to explore themes of creation, divine intervention, the transformative power of love, the nature of idealized love, and the gods’ willingness to reward someone’s genuine devotion to them. And so, Aphrodite grants life to the statue and transforms ivory into living flesh as a reward for Pygmalion’s devotion to her. Ovid, though, is just interested in this transformation and doesn’t go into much detail about Galatea and Pygmalion’s life after she is born. Pygmalion and Galatea’s love story, however, is supposed to be a love story unlike any other. But that is not what Madeline Miller portrays in her short story.
In Ovid, Galatea has no voice of her own and no agency. She is a woman who has been created (and given life) exclusively to both aesthetically please and physically satisfy her husband (or master). We know nothing about Pygmalion except that he is a sculptor and that he has a negative perception of women. Galatea’s happiness with Pygmalion is implied in the myth, but what if she is not happy?
Madeline Miller sets out to give Galatea her own voice, and I have to admit I was not expecting where that took us. I have read both of Madeline Miller’s other works, Circe and The Song of Achilles, and love her writing. I recommend this one as well.
3. CLASSICS AND POETRY: Metamorphoses by Ovid
I read this book as a companion book for One Hundred Years of Solitude. I know, right? Apparently, Gabriel García Márquez was heavily influenced by the Roman poet when he was writing his masterpiece. Metamorphoses is an epic, but what are epics about? The Iliad is about Achilles, The Odyssey about Odysseus, and in The Aeneid we follow Aeneas. In The Divine Comedy, we follow Dante the Pilgrim (which is different from Dante the author), and in Paradise Lost we follow Satan and the Heavenly couple Adam and Eve. This doesn’t happen with Metamorphoses.
In Metamorphoses, bodies change into new forms. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the most important metamorphoses is that of Coronel Aureliano Buendía, who changes into a shell of his former self after he signs the Treaty of Neerlandia and realizes that after 20 years of fighting against the conservatives, it was all for nothing. He is the prototypical “Julian hero” because he is fighting for a civic ideal or virtue, liberalism, he is loyal to that ideal and he is dedicated to bring it about. Nonetheless, he fails. And signing the Treaty of Neerlandia destroys him.
Love and romance is also an important theme in Metamorphoses and in Ovid. And writing about love is what Ovid did best. After all, it got him exiled from Rome. I first read this book in college (a long time ago) and don’t think I appreciated it as much as I did now. I saw it as a compendium of Roman mythology, similar to Edith Hamilton’s Mythology or Bulfinch’s Mythology, and hadn’t realized that all the myths are intrinsically linked to one another by the concept of transformation. Or that the ending of one myth leads to the beginning of the next. This in itself makes it so unlike Hamilton’s Mythology or Bulfinch’s Mythology, and I can appreciate Ovid’s mastery. Metamorphoses is instead an epic account of the history of Rome, from the Golden Age (the Age of Gods) to the Silver Age (the Age of Heroes) to the Bronze and Iron Age (the Age of History) back to the Golden Age (the Augustinian Era of Imperial Rome, and Ovid’s Rome during his lifetime). History for Ovid is circular.
And don’t forget, circularity is another important theme of A Hundred Years of Solitude. Hence, the incessant repetition of names.
4. HISTORICAL FICTION AND WWII: Daughters of Victory by Gabriella Saab
Books like The Alice Network, The Rose Code, and The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn are some of my favorite historical fiction books set in WWII. This author’s female protagonists are strong, independent, and fierce women. Their male counterparts are swoon-worthy romantic interests. I won’t deny it. I like how Kate Quinn writes romance. So, when I picked Daughters of Victory by Gabriella Saab up (it did say for fans of Kate Quinn), I was expecting something similar. I was so wrong. Not that this is a bad thing, I still liked this book very much. But I was also reminded that not all men are like those in Kate Quinn’s books.
This book has two timelines: the first is set in the years during the Russian Revolution, after the tsar abdicates the throne, and the immediate civil war between the political parties in Russia vying for power. The main character is a member of the Socialist party and she is fighting to prevent Lenin and the Bolshevik party from seizing power. Lenin, however, is protected by an elusive assassin known as Orlova and she is killing anyone and everyone standing in Lenin’s way to the top. So Svetlana sets out to kill her. The second timeline is set years later during the Siege of Leningrad in 1941 when the Germans attack Russia, and Mila, Svetlana’s granddaughter, falls under the spell of the Resistance movement.
I liked Svetlana. I didn’t like Mila, especially all her “This is my fight” nonsense. Granted, she is young and inexperienced. But she’s still a bit annoying and grating when she says things like this. I also didn’t like Svetlana’s love interest and I found Mila’s love interest rather meh. I get that the book isn’t a romance, and I wasn’t expecting it to be but I at least was expecting to like the guys. There are a lot of unexpected twists though, and I liked that. I liked the plot, the story, and the ending. The book is good, despite the fact that Mila got on my nerves some times but she finds her ground in the end.
5. NONFICTION AND SCIENCE: Ancestors by Professor Alice Roberts
You all know I like to read about burials. So when I saw this book, I thought I was going to love it, but for some reason I just didn’t. I couldn’t get hooked on it, and believe me, I tried. But I wasn’t invested in the cases the author talks about. Yes, they’re interesting but the book itself felt all over the place. There is no cohesion between the chapters and these, in my opinion, are sometimes a lot longer than they need to be. In trying to provide some background to the bones she’s talking about, the author goes into very long tangents and talks about a lot of other things (which I know are important and I agree that she needs to talk about them) before actually talking about the bones themselves, and when she does it is usually in the very last pages of the chapter. In trying to focus on the bones, she loses focus. Does that make sense?
This, I think, is actually the author’s first book, before she published Buried, which I read last year. And you can tell. Also, as ironic as it seems because I love to read about ancient history, I have a very hard time placing the exact time of hundreds and millions of years ago in my head. I’m still working on that. I will pick up this author’s third book Crypt, but I don’t think I’ll pick this one up again any time soon.
6. MYSTERY AND HISTORICAL FICTION: Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker
There are two genres that I read the least in genre fiction: Mystery/Thrillers and Science Fiction. I do have a favorite mystery series, the Sano Ichiro Series by Laura Joh Rowland. But I still haven’t found my second favorite and I have tried. I think I have a similar relationship with mysteries and thrillers as I do with romance. Most of the time, I find them so blatantly and obviously formulaic. And they are. We’ve all heard about the 3-Act structure, right? Genre fiction follows this structure 90-95% of the time. But in some books the formula stands out more than the plot and the story, and this is when I usually put a book down. And I have found that this is true of most mystery and romance books I’ve read.
Bruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker is formulaic and it’s not the best mystery book I’ve ever read, but I liked the writing and the main character. He’s flawed and he tries to do the best thing for his town and the people living in it. It is all about them, not him. He comes in last. Surprisingly, the antagonist barely even says a word and he isn’t really brought to the forefront during the investigation. He is important, as there wouldn’t be a book without him, but he doesn’t have an active role in the story after he commits the crime. What was interesting about this book was the victim and his backstory. This is, in my opinion, the best part of the book and why I decided to read the second one in the series. Let’s see if I like it.
That is everything I read this month. Thank you for stopping by.
