Melika’s Span 312 Blog

  This week we all read the first half of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It wasn’t a bad read, and I did enjoy it, but again not my favourite from what I have read so far. Although, there is so much to discuss about this book that I don’t even know where to start. From the themes, characters, storylines, and overall what I liked and didn’t like, I want to mention it all. Starting with themes, I saw the theme of magic realism but also themes of memory, death, and family. There were a lot of moments in the novel where a character stated they would never forget that moment. For example, “Aureliano, who could not have been more than five at the time, would remember him for the rest of his life” (6) or “That biting odour would stay forever in her mind linked to the memory of Melquiades (6). As far as I noticed, this theme has been used a bit in the first four chapters. Another theme is magic realism. We see this on the first page when the gypsy says, “things have

  Hello Blog readers,   This week’s novel was Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. Im not going to lie, I didn’t entirely understand what I was reading, but that is precisely what labyrinth means. As google defines, labyrinth is “a complicated irregular network of passages or paths in which it is difficult to find one’s way; a maze.” Thus, I acknowledge one of Borges’s goals was to confuse us and allow us to reanalyze what we know—to think again and try to put the pieces together as if they were a puzzle or maze.  I know I was reading a bunch of short stories, but they didn’t appear to fit together at all. It was a bunch of jumping from one plot to another without a deeper connection between the work. However, I liked how each story was relatively short, so we read various pieces. After watching this week’s lecture video, I know Borges wanted to make his work interesting by being real and raw and that legacy and inheritance are important to Borges. However, I couldn’t grasp that mys