New Year, new books, guys. Here goes.
Welcome.
1. CLASSIC AND MAGICAL REALISM: Cien Años de Soledad by Gabriel García Márquez
Now I’m going to start this review saying that I was fortunate enough during college to meet Gabriel García Márquez (GGM). He visited my school campus in 2004 and I had the privilege to listen to a Q&A session about A Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Años de Soledad) with other students of the Bachelor program I was in. I also tried to get his autograph. Unfortunately, he stopped signing books before it was my turn, and I couldn’t. Truth be told, it was a very private event and very few people in the entire campus (which was pretty big) knew he was even there. He is, however, the only giant of Spanish literature that I have had the privilege to meet (from afar). I confess though that in 2004 (I was 21 years old), I had not read A Hundred Years of Solitude yet and when I did a couple of years later, I did not understand it and thus did not like it.
Here’s the thing. This is one of my sister’s favorite books, so when GGM died ten years later in 2014, she cried. I distinctly remember this, and she still says that his death affected her very much. I did not understand this. I did not think he was that good, to be honest (oh poor naïve me), and I didn’t understand why my sister was so affected by it. Fast forward another 10 years, and finally I do understand. This book is a masterpiece. And I finally understand too that I had some growing up to do. I read this book twice [once in Spanish and another in English (the English translation will appear in my February Wrap Up)] and, as a side note, I will say that the English translation of this book by Gregory Rabassa is one of the best translations of modern classic literature that I’ve ever read. It is so good that I understood better some things in English than I did in Spanish. It’s that good.
A Hundred Years of Solitude is a book about the genealogy of the Buendía family, whose lineage is irrevocably tied to Macondo. The town is in its zenith when the Buendía line is at its most fertile and healthy (as healthy as it can be when you interbreed) and at its nadir when the Buendías are dying and almost extinct. Although the book starts by narrating the life of José Arcadio Buendía as the first of his line and the founder of Macondo and later ends with Aureliano (Babilonia) Buendía as the last living member of the family, it is really the women who give birth and breathe to both the lineage of the Buendías and to Macondo. Úrsula is the matriarch and the one who refuses to leave Macondo at the beginning of the book; she is also the one that builds on to the house in later chapters. The (re)construction and eventual destruction of the Buendía house is the way that we physically witness the birth and death of the Buendía line. The Buendías and Macondo die, on the other hand, when Pilar Ternera dies in the last chapter. Note that both of these women live to be more than 100 years old. All the other women in between, Remedios (Coronel Aureliano Buendía’s wife), Rebeca, Amaranta, Fernanda, Remedios The Beauty, Meme and Amaranta Úrsula, slowly but surely kill the line throughout their lifetimes. Fernanda stands out because it is with her that the Buendías (and Macondo) start to die. Despite giving Aureliano Segundo three children, she is an agent of death. Petra Cotes is her opposite, and it is she who makes cows and other animals proliferate so abundantly. The duality of life vs. death is present throughout the entirety of this book.
This book has three main topics: solitude, death, and circularity. Solitude is both a terminal disease and a deathly realm. Coronel Aureliano Buendía, for example, is lost in the solitude of his power. He is fated to live a life without love. Sex and virginity are also important in this book. Sex, for example, is a palliative to solitude. Hence, he fathers 17 Aurelianos, all of them from different mothers. Palliatives ease the pain of death and solitude, and because solitude is a terminal disease some characters find a temporary cure to the deathliness of solitude in sex. Amaranta too does this when she starts kissing and caressing Aureliano José as a lover and not as an aunt ought to do. The secret of a good old age is then to make a pact with your solitude.
This is not an easy book to read and many people struggle with it. I had to read it twice to understand it more and start to love it. I highly recommend it but I also recommend that you take your time with it.
2. NONFICTION, SCIENCE AND TRUE CRIME: Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason de León
This book is not only an anthropological study of human smuggling from Guatemala and Honduras to Mexico, and from there to the United States, but also an account of the lives of South American migrants who leave their countries of origin in search of a better life for themselves and their families; of migrants who are running away from a life of crime that threatens their lives and that of their families.
The journey from Guatemala and Honduras to the United States is fraught with danger, however. First, from South American gangs and other criminal organizations who run things up to the Mexican border in Guatemala and then from the Mexican cartels that control different routes from Southern Mexico to the border with the United States in the North. In addition, there’s the Beast, a freight train that crosses the entirety of Mexico from Arriaga, Chiapas, to Nogales or Laredo in the North. The Beast has three different routes, one that ends in Nogales, Sonora, another in Tijuana, Baja California and a third that goes through cities close to the Gulf of Mexico. No matter what route you take, though, the dangers of riding on top of the train are the same: You can fall off and die or be arrested by Mexican immigration officers, who according to many, do not treat migrants as humanely as they say they do.
Migration is a hot topic in current US-Latin American relations, and one of the main points of contention between Mexico and the United States today. So, I am not surprised that this book is getting the attention it is getting. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2024, this book doesn’t talk so much about the migrants themselves though but of the people helping those migrants get to the border and cross it. The people who do this for a living: the coyotes, human smugglers, or guides, as they call themselves. There is, the author says, an important difference between human smuggling and human trafficking. Both are illegal, yes, but human trafficking happens against your will. You are a victim of a crime that someone else is committing in order to obtain a profit from you (e.g. prostitution or sale of organs in the black market). Human smuggling, on the other hand, is something you pay someone else to do for you. You are both asking the guide to take you to the border between the US and Mexico and you are willing to pay the money to get there (this includes paying the cartels and gangs to let you through their territory). It’s the other side of the coin, basically.
Jason de León tells the story of a group of smugglers he met during his fieldwork in Chiapas as he takes us by the hand and helps us understand better how and why some people become guides and do that for a living as long as they do. This is not an easy book to read; most migrants leave their countries running away from criminal organizations that have targeted them, but in doing so they have become criminals themselves by crossing the border into Mexico and eventually the US illegally. In the end, they cannot escape what they are running from and become enmeshed in the net of criminality, nonetheless.
3. SELF-HELP AND PARENTING: Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want To Be by Becky Kennedy
I hadn’t realized how much parenting books sell until I became one. Or was about to. I started buying these books, for example, The Conscious Parents Guide to Raising Girls, since I was pregnant. But I buy them, and I don’t read them. So, naturally I needed a little nudge to read this one. And it’s not that I don’t think they’re worth reading or that they can’t help me in my parenting journey (they most certainly can, that’s why I buy them), it’s that I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with self help books. And I do not say this in order to demean their importance. The right self help book for you and what you need is tantamount for your well-being. I just say, “Yeah, I can read that.” And then I don’t, because I don’t feel like it pretty quickly after I purchase it. Am I the only one this happens to?
This book, however, was recommended to me by several parents and I picked it up at the same time as my husband did. In other words, we made the effort (in our nonexistent spare time) to read it together. And I got a lot out of it. It made me think twice about a lot of things that I am doing today as a parent with my two daughters, but it also took me back to my childhood and it made me think about how my mom and dad parented me, if that makes any sense. It made me notice and realize how I can change and break bad patterns (or patterns that are not considered as good parenting today). The premise is that we are all human, and just because sometimes you yell at your kids sometimes (we all do it), that doesn’t mean that you’re a bad parent. We’re all good inside; some things are just more challenging than others and we are allowed to be human.
I recommend this book to other parents as well.
4. HISTORICAL FICTION AND WWII: City of Thieves by David Benioff
I did not mean to read three historical fiction books set in WWII this month, but I did. And this was the one that I liked the most. Set during the siege of Leningrad in September 1941, the protagonist Lev Beniov, the author’s grandfather, sets out to find a dozen eggs for a wedding cake. It being a siege, there are of course no eggs in Leningrad. Food is more valuable than gold during a war, and this book reminds us of that lesson. After being arrested for looting the dead body of a German, Lev is taken to the commander of the Red Army and tasked to find the eggs if he does not want to be executed in less than a week. But, in order to find them, Lev and his companion, Kolya, a Russian Army deserter, must cross the enemy line.
The book is very well written. Despite its short length, the author transports you seamlessly to September 1941 and you experience both the ravages of the war and siege as well as the characters’ perpetual sense of fear and hunger during the siege of Leningrad along with them throughout the entirety of the novel. And I liked this. Most historical novels I’ve read set during WWII are more romance novels set in WWII than anything else, and this I think was the other way around. There is (implied) romance in this book, yes, as Lev meets and falls in love with his wife during this egg hunt but his romance with her is not the main focus of the book. Even the egg hunt itself is not the most important thing here. That is Lev’s budding friendship and comradeship with Kolya, who, sadly, (spoiler alert) dies at the end. Kolya changes Lev, and this man, David Benioff says, is as much a part of his past as he is of his grandfather’s.
I liked this book and will probably read it again. I also listened to the audiobook version, but I will say that this is not as good. The narrator does not do a good job with the dialogue; he reads it all in the same tone of voice and it is very hard to distinguish what character is saying what when you listen to it while you’re driving, for example, and can’t really pick up the physical copy to determine that. That was very frustrating.
5. HISTORICAL FICTION AND WWII: The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean
This book is written in third person present tense, and I am not a big fan of this combination. Mainly because it is harder for me to suspend my disbelief and immerse myself in the story, despite the author’s intention of creating more tension and making it seem as if whatever is happening in the book is happening right now and that I am experiencing it right along with the characters. I know that this writing style has become increasingly popular with genre fiction writers ever since screenplay writers (screenplays are written in third person present tense) started adapting books to films, and some stories are better suited for this style than others, yes, but it is still not a form of writing that I can engage in or read easily. It is too jarring, and I keep getting pulled out of the story. However, in this book it does work a little. The main character is an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, and third person present tense is used to relate her memories as a young woman in Russia working as a tour guide in the Heritage Museum during the war. This point of view gives those memories, which will eventually be relevant in the current timeline when she is older and sick, some immediacy and urgency. And I think that this is very well done. Still, I didn’t love the book. The ending is rather lackluster and the way the author joins the two timelines together at the end is wanting. But I did enjoy the passages in which Marina steps into the rooms of her memory palace and describes the art displayed on their walls. Those passages took me back to my art appreciation classes in high school and I looked up new paintings and sculptures from some of my favorite artists like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Reubens and Titian. That was cool, because I’d never read a book in which art is so prominent like this. And, in my opinion, this is the best part of the book. That is why I wanted to love it. But unfortunately, I didn’t. The story itself didn’t have the impact I thought it would. It had all the things to make me love it, but I didn’t. And that is very sad to me.
6. HISTORICAL FICTION AND WWII: We Were The Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter
I did not finish this one. Don’t get me wrong, the story of the author’s family is very interesting but the writing style was a huge deterrent for me. This too is a book written in third person present tense and, like I said before, I do not like this point of view. While I appreciated the historical interludes that let us know about the political background of the novel, I do not think that third person present tense works in this book. I get that the author wants to help us immerse ourselves in the story and make us experience what is happening to the characters along with them, but the way in which she chooses to do this is poorly executed. Second, I didn’t connect with the characters. The more I read, the more detached I felt from them. I would have loved to have connected with the characters and experience the story as if I were there with them, but that didn’t happen. I didn’t even mind the different points of view. In fact, I’ve read books with a lot more point of view characters than this one. Game of Thrones by George RR Martin, for example. But while I think that Martin is a master of the third person limited point of view and that he chooses the right strategy to narrate his story, I don’t think that this is the case here. I know I am in the minority here. This book is very popular and a lot of people have loved it. But I just couldn’t get into it. It’s the nerd and language scholar in me. In addition, I wanted to love the characters, to connect with them, but I just couldn’t. They are one-dimensional and flat. None of them, despite their harrowing stories and interesting lives, had any character development (as far as I read though). And trust me, I wanted to stick with them. I wanted to know them and like them and live the terrible things they went through with them (as weird as that sounds considering that it’s WWII we’re talking about) but no. Third person and present tense in storytelling don’t mix very well, in my opinion. I know I keep coming back to this, but this makes the narration feel more told. We are not in each character’s head, experiencing and feeling what they are experiencing and feeling in tandem. Instead, it’s an outside narrator that uses a lot of adverbs and adjectives that make the story clunkier and give the text a more noticeable sense of being told.
I will probably watch the limited series on Hulu because I am still interested in the story, but I will not finish the book.
