Wednesday, October 22, 2008

One Hundred Years of Solitude Now Has a Contender

What can I say about Madame Bovary? Easy: IT'S DULL! This book I can compare to my least favorite book of all time, One Hundred Years of Solitude, without any guilt or without batting an eye. The book only brought up more questions then it did answers; mostly along the lines of, "What's the point?", "Is there a point?", etc. One Hundred Years of Solitude jumps rapidly from period to period, starting two decades into the story, then jumping to the beginning, then three years early, five years later, all with characters that have the same name as the last one! All the while the reader feels nothing but pure depression because the characters don't' speak, but the author decibels the depression, the disease, and the melancholy of their home. Now, granted, Madame Bovary does not start at some ridiculous time period and then jump back ten years, nor do all the characters have the exact same name as its previous one, but it does jump. Its jumps are like side-tracks of the mind; Flaubert might be talking about, say, Emma and her husband, before going on a completely random tangent about the countryside, its beauty, what the flowers can be used for...then goes back to a new character hardly introduced. What??!! Hold up there, Flaubert, I need a little bit more information then just some random tangent. If you're going to go off on a tangent, then make it tie into everything else! And no more, "Boo hoo, I hate my life, I'm gonna go die now," crap. We do not read books to become emo suicidal killers. Come on: you're [Emma] sleeping around with gorgeous men who would bring you the moon and who make you feel happy and princess-like. You, with your selfishness and constant need for affection that is not needy or obsessive cannot be that disappointed in life right now! Honestly. Go take you're whining somewhere else.
Yeah, okay, so that might have been a little over the top, but seriously: I read to gain a higher intelligence, a deeper respect for writers, and a new perspective of the world. I do not read to turn my brain into goo.

3 comments:

Walker said...

Hey, so Mr. Creature, there totally is a point. You're so wrong. The point was to open your eyes to the realities of life. You see that not everything is like romance stories. Plus, what about the humor, it's hilarious. Emma's death, the blind man, clubfoot, there's multiple scenes of enjoyment. I will admit that some scenes do get dull and boring, but you have to look to the humor.

Kenya said...

Agreed that the book pertains to One Hundred Years of Solitude but it DOES give a sense of reality. Life is not meant to be like a book and this book offers more of what reality really is, jumping around. Yes, boring and dull but TRUE!

David Lavender said...

I'm really amazed on two counts: first that you thought this read like One Hundred Years of Solitude (magic realism, as the name implies, is very different from Realism), and second, that you didn't like Marquez' book (one of my all time favorites).

Hmmm... guess I'll just have to wait for class to have you clarify your observations.