"Chronicle of a Death Foretold" (1981) by Gabriel García Márquez

How much damage can mass apathy cause? Written in retrospective journalist style (23 years after the event), GGM recasts in "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" a real-life crime story where a man was murdered in the name of family honour by two brothers for taking away the virginity of their sister, who was rejected by her groom after the wedding for her lack of pre-marital chastity. The perpetrators acted upon unproven single-source accusations and blind rage and they announced their act publicly in broad daylight. The entire community did nothing to stop the crime, but why? Unlike traditional detective stories, this novella is not so much about finding clues and solving puzzles, but some collective soul-searching on the bystanders' parts on how their apathy and interlocked excuses allowed the crime to happen and left them in remorse for the next 23 years. The autopsy episode and the murder scene are materials straight out of Itchy and Scratchy. It might be terrible of me to laugh out loud, but GGM's magical realism was taken to an extreme absurdist and sarcastic level that it is impossible to determine whether the overall tone of the work is a tragic or a dark humourous one. The reader is left with plenty of information and testimonies to decide for oneself why the entire community did nothing - was it because the victim is an Arab? Because he is rich? Pure stupidity? Some hearsay? "Someone else would sort it out"? Nobody took the announcement of murder seriously? If you are after a Márquez digest, this novella is just as wondrous and tightly constructed as his epic works. It is a page-turner, as entertaining and thought-provoking as one wants it to be. There is a dose of straight up romance towards the end too. Perfect reading for a leisure weekend. P.S. a certain Sara Noriega is mentioned here in passing, is it the same one in "Love in the Time of Cholera", the novel to come in 1985?

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1984) by Milan Kundera

Are there any books that most of your friends sing endless praises on, and you pick it up, read it cover to cover without prejudice or expectations, then think it is a massive waste of time? Since one can easily find lots of positive comments elsewhere, at the risk of offending my friends, I shall offer an alternative perspective here. Nobody picks up a fiction and expects to learn existential philosophy academically. This is not a textbook, but when a work starts with an upfront discourse on Nietzsche, the myth of Sisyphus and the notion of "Being", the reader is led to take this foreword as the basis against which the subsequent trajectory is set. The brevity of the discussion comes across as superficial and inevitably invites disagreement. That is not a problem in itself as the thoughtful reader should be capable of distilling substance regardless of position, but as the book progresses it turns into a convoluted, contrived and over-stretched allegory of very little substance. "Lightness" and "weight" are questionable and unreliable metaphorical quantities to measure life with anyway, and linking lightness and weight in the metaphysical sense to the physical sense in sexuality is an unacceptably juvenile and wild extrapolation. The text is particularly pompous and obnoxious when the author redefines perspectives on the readers' behalf in a series of "Words Misunderstood" and reevaluates the story of rampant adultery by lecturing, with very shallow philosophical underpinnings, the readers in Part Six. The entire reading experience is an unbearable weight of an authoritative tone imposing unbalanced opinions on the reader, which is ironic given the political context of the work. The saving grace is Part Seven where the notion of "Being" is reexamined by considering the life and euthanasia of a dog, which sheds more light on the discussion than the rest of the book (does a dog even concern itself with lightness and weight? By Cartesian philosophy, does it even qualify as a "Being"?) There must be a reason why this book generated cult following, but neither my philosophy, preference nor personality align with any part of this book.

"Orlando" (1928) by Virginia Woolf

What can one say about a book like "Orlando"? It is a masterpiece, no less, a through and through satirical work, to the point where the sarcasm becomes an exhausting overkill. Modern feminists would find it justifiable to warrant this level of ridicule to reflect the severity of historical sexual double standards. It is as much Virginia Woolf's private love letter to her real-life lesbian lover Vita Sackville-West as a public work of fiction - Orlando is the idealised version of VSW. This mock biography chronicles the life of an extraordinary human being who lives for 300 years to mingle with different English aristocrats and literary figures and who, without explanation and elaboration in a Kafka-esque manner in the middle of the novel, transforms into a woman and lives on under different social expectations. Orlando lives through the ups and downs of an aristocratic household. It is satirical on (at least) three levels: 1) it appropriates the literary styles of the times to accentuate the pretentiousness of such figures; 2) through the eyes of a transgender individual, it portrays sexual inequalities throughout the ages and; 3) taking inspirations from the history of downfall of the Sackville-West family, criticising British aristocratic life and practices. As a non-British non-literary polemicist, the majority of the content hardly concerns me, let alone the private matters of the people involved, and the abundance of in-jokes make it a very difficult read even with the help of the explanatory notes. That is not to say "Orlando" is not worth reading. Quite the contrary, I am very glad to have gone through this fascinating exploration of "new" writing form and also to have a detailed look at one feminist's powerful arguments against centuries of frustrating injustice. If anything, one also gets to read about old London. It is unlikely to be a title one would "like" in the conventional sense, but there is much to admire and appreciate intellectually.

"No One Writes to the Colonel" (1961) by Gabriel García Márquez

At 69 pages of 10-point font, "No One Writes to the Colonel" is one of the rarer outputs by Gabriel García Márquez that the casual reader can stomach in one sitting - just. If you read this short story retrospectively after finishing "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera", you will find a lot of common themes here, such as solitude, waiting over a long stretch of time, stubbornness, living under a totalitarian regime, living with dignity, and hope that borders on blind faith. In a sense, this is a less skeletal version of "Waiting for Godot". The fictional Colombian city of Macondo, its train, the banana industry, the Thousand Days' War and Colonel Aureliano Buendía are also mentioned in the work. Given its brevity, recurring themes and comparative simplicity in language, one is beguiled to consider it a prototype of sorts, but that kind of pigeonholing would be massively unfair to what is otherwise a great standalone work. It is remarkable how touching and, frankly, haunting the prose is when Márquez does not go overboard with magical realism and sarcasm. In fact, it is written almost entirely in realism. The story follows the lives of a retired colonel and his heavily asthmatic wife. The colonel religiously checks the post in anticipation for his military pension that has not arrived for fifteen years due to hierarchical corruption. The impoverished couple sells all their possessions for survival except for a clock, a picture and the rooster that they inherited from their son who was killed in political repression. The ordinary rooster, of unknown origin, condition and fate, practically drives the lives of that described society - it gives people (some) hope, (some) identity, (some) courage and, with luck, (some) money. The abrupt ending inevitably incites debates among optimists, pessimists and realists to decide whether blind faith and devotion are valuable assets under life-threatening circumstances. It is an unkind joke on the author's part, but what isn't black humour in this harsh world?