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(April 19, 2002)

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Books, which we mistake for consolation, only add depth to our sorrow

Orhan Pamuk


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🦋 Cien años de incesto

I now believe that what most interested me in the novel, was to tell the story of a family obsessed by incest.

— Gabriel García Márquez
Interview with Claude Couffon, 1968

Incest is all over the place in 100 Years of Solitude, practically every narrative block contains an incestuous relationship or one that hints at incestuous desires. I wonder what it is doing, what it is signifying? I've always sort of thought of this novel as being about the history of Colombia and about the Spanish conquest of Latin America; I'm not sure what role incest (or inbreeding, or incest and inbreeding as metaphor) plays there. Likely, of course, not a simple metaphor...

It was interesting to watch Máncora last night, a recent Peruvian film about (among other things) an incestuous relationship, and have García Márquez in the back of my mind while I was watching it. Not much similarity at all between the two works or between the uses of incest in the two works, but fun to think about how the two different authors are using this device for their own ends. Looks like it's a bit of a central theme for this filmmaker, Ricardo de Montreuil; his other movie is called My Brother's Wife.

(...and now all of a sudden I am thinking about Ada...)

posted evening of Sunday, March 27th, 2011
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