The Magician in a Strange Land

Marquez's creation of a sense of the absurd is first-rate, and it's what he's known for. His writing style is more flamboyant and more workmanlike than his favorite, Kafka. But the sense of the absurd is a poetic layer of encryption of real meaning, and the reader must be sharp enough to find the author's true intentions in the flurry of imagery.

I preferred The Holy Virgin, I Just Came to Make a Phone Call, and Mrs. Forbes's Happy Summer, which are not only at the height of absurdity, but also have very tense plots.

Marquez is always one to talk about love and loneliness, but he is able to ship one gorgeous outfit after another for these two old men, allowing the reader to watch him conjure up all sorts of different gadgets like a magician in an early treasure chest.

The narrative and verbal style is gorgeously fantastical, the story overall average. It's about the later years of an overthrown president. Even in his old age, the former president can only sell his family's assets to pay for the operation, and he can only restrain himself in the face of his tongue. Maybe the author wanted to convey the powerlessness in the face of death? I don't like it very much, I think it's average.

More than ten years after Magritto's daughter's death, he realizes during a graveside removal that her body has not decayed and is still as intact as when she died, and that she has lost all her weight.

He put his daughter's body in a box, hoping that everyone would see that his daughter was a holy woman. But he pursued this for 22 years and boiled down five popes without getting his wish. The directors of the New Wave period heard his story and also felt it couldn't be made into a movie.

In the end, the "I" in the story gives his assessment of Magritto: through the immortal body of his daughter, he has fought for twenty-two years to accomplish the undeniable cause of joining the ranks of the saints.

Magritto is alone, and the only person who understands him throughout the story is the zoo lion. Sadly, it's only a lion. His roommates see how awkward he looks when he talks to women and decide to find a woman who can have fun with him. But the woman is scared off by the Virgin in the box, and the New Wave director, who represents commerce, is deterred from changing the body of this story if it is to be made into a movie. Magritto is bent on finding relief in religion, but is also unsuccessful.

What may await him in the end is the judgment of God, who is best able to give a fair answer to everyone, and who will crown Magritto, as "I" would say, in his struggle to become a saint himself.

I suppose so.

Hahaha I'm sure I'm a straight guy who still likes novels that are easy to understand.

This one is very un-Marxian, or not a novel at all, but at best an essay with a bit of spice. It's about a beautiful woman he meets at the airport, who happens to be sitting next to him on the same flight as himself. The beauty sleeps the whole time, and he is beside her in all kinds of YY

A woman who can predict the future through dreaming, she has a snake ring on her hand, and she lives her life by dreaming.

Gorgeous and hollow. Since the beginning of time humans have been unable to let go of dreams, curious about what happens in moments when consciousness seems to be absent. But this subject has been seen so often that I did not read anything new in this article. I don't really get the so-called Borgesian labyrinth that Neruda and the dream-occupier dream about each other, either; could it be an emphasis on intuition in dreams and poetry?GET NOTHING.

In Marquez's novels, it's full of people talking to themselves. It's especially evident in "I Just Came to Make a Phone Call."

Maria keeps repeating that she's here just to make a phone call and that she's not a mental patient.

The female guard listens to her repetitions without understanding them; she thinks about how to sleep with Maria.

The female Herculean listens to her repetition but does not understand, she thinks about how Maria is going to escape and how she herself has to stop her in a phycical form because she is the best at phycical tactics.

The husband receives a call from Maria without believing her, he only believes that Maria is a whore, he only believes that he has been betrayed because he has been betrayed before, and he is willing to believe in such a pathetic plot.

After experiencing the vicissitudes of life, everyone begins to repeat themselves, wearing tinted glasses made of their own experience to see this colorful world, which is probably the most simple and sincere sadness behind the magnificent magical reality of the Marquez style.

Did Marquez also write horror novels?

I saw Mr. Zhang commenting on Marquez in Zhihu, saying that everyone in his novels has their own set of worldviews. The result of such people touching together is loneliness and absurdity. It's like that cemetery salesman who likes to judge his clients' occupations based on their homes, but after confidently inquiring about them, he learns that Maria is a prostitute and has to run away. Maria, who has been taking care of the aftermath, realizes at the end that the dream she had three years ago was not actually a prediction of death, but rather a foreshadowing of someone's arrival. This ending links love and death in a way that is also quite mysterious.

When I first read it, I was black with a question mark on my face, and after looking it up on Facebook, I came across an answer to the question, "Why does the person who worries about losing you every day end up leaving first? Under the answer. It was explained in terms of "The Devil in the Hills", saying that the fear of the unknown makes us choose to run away, leading the young man who was dragged away by the Swede to escape his fear by dying. That would make sense, and could be said to be the intent of the piece, but I still think it's slightly over the top in that form

Loved this one.

The gist of it is that my brother and I are forced to be militarized one summer by a governess hired by our dad, Mrs. Forbes, a female German officer who smells like monkey urine to us, but whom Dad thinks smells like civilization. But eventually, Mrs. Forbes is found dead in her home with 27 fatal stab wounds.

The closing paragraph of the novel is very chilling: "She was densely covered with stab wounds. Twenty-seven of them were fatal. It was evident from the number and cruelty of the wounds that they had been inflicted in the frenzy stirred up by intense sex, and Mrs. Forbes accepted the injuries with the same passion, not even screaming or crying, but reciting Schiller in her soldierly, flooding, beautiful voice, soberly aware that this was the price she had to pay for her summer of pleasure."

I've seen some comments saying that Mrs. Forbes, who was rationally restrained during the day and died at night of violent sex, was a victim of rationalism, and that the essay was a diatribe against rationalism. That's certainly one way of thinking about understanding it.

Personally, I would understand the novel on a more human level.

Marquez actually creates a character who hates her own self, in Mrs. Forbes' mind she despises herself, she doesn't feel she deserves to be loved or to feel joy, so during the day she chooses to punish herself with harsh rules. Her inner feelings are released in the darkness of the night.

After seeing the death of Mrs. Forbes at the end, go back and read the description of the night she died.

"Early that morning she talked to herself again for a long time, and in a fit of near-madness she recited Schiller's verses at the top of her voice, climbing to the top at last with a scream that resounded through the house. Then she uttered so many sighs that it seemed as if her whole soul poured out, and at last, with the mournful and prolonged whistle of a lifetime like that of a drifting boat, she came to peace."

In this description, although the point of view is outside Mrs. Forbes's room, our imagery is more realistic than if we were looking directly into the room. It is as if we see the climactic Mrs. Forbes begging the object of her lovemaking to kill her, wishing for her own destruction in this moment of supreme bliss, for only by destroying can she complete the atonement for this supreme bliss.

In association with the previous text, Mrs. Forbes at the beach during the day is either heavily armed or wearing a sharkskin-like bathing suit but never goes into the water. She is afraid of the daytime, which allows her to expose herself to her powerful and perfect superego, and she cannot face the pleasure-hungry, orgasm-hungry self in her heart.

A Practice Writing Exercise

Dandy Billy Sanchez is driving to Paris with his new wife, Nina Duckender, when Nina's hand is bloodied by a rose thorn, and Billy takes her to the hospital in Paris. Billy, an older boy who has always relied on Nina, is at a loss after losing her, and with the language barrier, he is at a loss for words in Paris. He couldn't find Nina at the hospital, nor could he find her attending doctor. When he finds the Asian doctor again a week later, he realizes that his wife is dead.

Content-wise, apart from the human loneliness and the absurdity of love that Marquez often liked to react to, I can only read this as a coming-of-age story for a man. The form is still excellent, with the single and double parking design shining through.