Saturday, June 28, 2008

Historia De Mi Vida

The first, long, rambling paragraph of Cien Anos de Soledad is one of the great gems of 20th Century literature:
"... The world was then so young that many things still did not have a name, and to talk about them you had to point to them with your finger... Jose Aureliano Buendia, whose wild imagination always went far beyond the genius of nature, thought that it would be possible to use that invention [magnets] to extract gold from the earth. Melquiades, who was an honourable man, warned him:" It's not for that." But at that time Jose Aureliano Buendia did not believe in the honour of gypsies, so he swapped a mule and a pair of goats for the two magnetized ingots...
Buendia's wife Ursula tried to talk him out of buying the magnets, to no avail. He took a team of men all over the region, even dredging the bottom of the river, and all they found was an ancient suit of armour, with a skeleton inside, and around the skeleton's neck was a keepsake with the image of a woman's face.

That's just the first paragraph!

Who will write the literature of the 21st century? Will we even have something called "literature" any more?