I've been reading One Hundred Years of Solitude since yesterday. I kept hoping for some turn for the better, but the slow erosion of greatness by the world just grinds on. Finally I realized what was happening. This is The Sound and the Fury transferred to Colombia, with a touch of The Snopes Trilogy and a smidgeon of Absalom, Absalom!
But this book doesn't seem to be as great as Faulkner. The characters are born the way they die, each generation massively static and the only change coming from a falling off between generations. It is profoundly fatalistic, depressingly so, but not very true to human experience.
Gabriel García Márquez is also not very funny. Perhaps he is in his native language—much of Faulkner's humor is untranslatable—but he seems too sincerely absorbed in beating his dead mule to stop and tell a funny story about little boys shooting at each other or a cuckolded husband accidentally carrying the intruder across country on his back when what he meant was to get at the man's innards with a butcher knife.
This lack of humor may not seem very important, but mankind is terribly ridiculous, so much so that a humorous author with no pretensions at realism (such as P.G. Wodehouse) hits bullseyes while an author ready to deny in the name of realism that man is capable of laughter (such as Thomas Hardy) is only readable when he lands far from where he aimed. In fact, Faulkner's increase in greatness is matched by the increasingly comic (in both senses) nature of his work.
I'm about 3/4s of the way through, and if I stop reading I have to work on a budget. And I don't really want yet another unfinished book on my hands. Yet I've got my computer on my lap and Microsoft Excel is open, so it looks like my fate is decided.
