One of the real magicians:
Today’s entry from Darwin’s Beagle diary:
29th May 1832
Rio de Janeiro
Cloudy greyish day, something like an Autumnal one in England; without however its soothing quietness. I wanted to send a note this morning into the city & had the greatest difficulty in procuring anybody to take it. All white men are above it, & every black about here is a slave. This, amongst other things, is one great inconvenience of a slave country.
Darwin was in fact strongly anti-slavery. As a grandson of Josiah Wedgwood he was probably brought up that way, but his experiences visiting Brazil reinforced it and stayed with him for the rest of his life. Still, it’s not the most felicitous bit of phrasing.
This is marvellous. I haven’t read any Marquez for a bit, and I’d forgotten just how good he is. It describes the decline and death of the dictator of an invented Caribbean country, with each chapter as one long, run-on sentence. It’s beautifully written, dark and absurd and I guess you would call it surreal, although if you’ve ever read much about the courts of real dictators, the incidents start seeming less far-fetched.
For example, at one point he discovers that all the modern buildings he’s seen from his presidential limo are just facades, put up to fool him into thinking that progress is being made. Well, when Mao was travelling through an area, people used to plant the rice paddies near the train tracks at super-high densities so it would look like his great plans for improving rice production were working. The rice duly died, of course.
The whole atmosphere of the court—paranoid, corrupt, hedonistic, violent, capricious, self-deceptive—and the relationship between the dictator and those trying to anticipate his wishes seems convincing to me. It would be a pity if the surreal touches led people to think the book is unrecognisably exaggerated from reality.
Flickr set of the week is Buenos Aires Street Art by mikeyernst.
