I’ve read about three of his books now and thinking back, all three of them have an adult man having a full-fledged sexual relationship with a young girl.
Love in the time of cholera, one hundred years of solitude, and of love and other demons.
Each time it’s a main character, not a side character and in one hundred years of solitude, I kind of waved it away as the whole family being strange and fucked up.
But then love and other demons paints the child as a seductress to a priest (if I remember right) and love in the time of cholera has one of the main characters grooming a family member then discarding her when he has a chance to reclaim his lost love.
by towalktheline
11 Comments
It’s a common theme in rural parts of humanity, sadly.
Hopefully a lot less common than than in Gabo’s time.
yep. this is why I can’t stand his writing. It’s interesting that it’s explained away as passion (for example) ‘Despite her extreme youth’ other women characters die as virgins, as though that’s a fate never to be considered as anything other than disgraceful, although they usually end up as kind aunt-type figures – untainted by sex, geddit? It’s endlessly interesting.
And incest!
These things were common back in the days.
Of course it is. In order to be an artist you have to have the courage to be offensive.
Can’t speak for the others, but Love in the Time of Cholera is about a narrator deteriorating as a person until they become despicable, hidden behind flowery romantic sounding language.
You do know the books are works of FICTION right
Yes, it’s unfortunate because I love his writing. I went back to reread 100 years and this element was really unpleasant.
The first time I read it I was younger and the pedophilia was just part of the soup: 1,000s of unexpected events just piled on top of each other. The book was pretty disorienting and I was a bit of a “power through and rack up wins” kind of reader at the time. I went back to it because I realized I’d missed so much, and read it more carefully.
I got about 100 pages in and just stopped. It was too gross and leached the fun out of the book. I stopped caring about the Buendia family and what happened to them. The pedophilia really pulled me out of the story.
What people don’t really get about him in this sub is that both pedophilia and incest are recurring themes in latinoamerica, not just in Garcia Marquez books.
Magical realism occurs when the latinamerican reality is seen through the western eye. The feeling of discomfort one has when reading about pedophilia is not experienced by the characters in the book, because it is normalized. There is no morality or message or metaphor. It just is. This separation between narrative and reader, and the feeling it produces, is the basis of magical realism.
It’s not just waaaacky things happening with no rhyme or reason, like in Murakami’s books.
A symptom of a world that exists in rural areas longer due to lack of education or resistance to change. One in which 12 year olds were fair game for marriage and having children.
It’s kind of like when people called the Greeks pedophiles because of pederasty but won’t acknowledge the fact everyone was grooming children for marriage and children early…it was a shitty thing and lasted too long.
Somehow I’ve never heard of Love and Other Demons. That’s just an absolutely wonderful title for a book!