24 April 2022
NEWPORT BEACH, Calif.—I’m reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez again for the second time, four years after my first pass at it, and I feel I could live my whole life and still discover new lovely things in the book’s pages. I sat and read in the sun and watched and smelled the blooming and withering jasmine flowers that line the wall between my courtyard and my neighbor’s house, and I felt that the book reads like a fairy tale dream. I read passages that feel magical, like the one that describes how yellow flowers start raining from the sky after one of the characters dies, and the townspeople have to clear away the flower petals so the funeral procession for the character can pass. The writing that surrounds passages like this one can feel more mundane, more “real.” But then you sense that the mundane parts are also part of the fairy tale dream, because while those parts feel like a reporter recounting facts, you find that you cannot draw a clear line between the facts and things like the raining flower petals. The effect is that when you put down the book and go back to the world around you, what you thought were mundane things now carry a magical tint to them, and you feel that fairy tale dreams must be all around you if you know the right way of seeing. And so, Marquez’s words are like a kind of genetic inheritance, or transference, changing the way you are in the world. 