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Words Fascinate me.

I am starting a series of blogs wherein I will be talking about the books that I haved loved the most.

Let me start off with one of my all time favourite books, One hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, one of the masters of the Magic Realism genre. To define what Magic Realism is indeed difficult but let me make a try. Magic Realism is seeing life with a new set of eyes : combining magic with the mundane, coupling the ordinary with the fantastic, seamlessly blended so much so that you are left wondering what is real and what is unreal. You cannot survive from the hands of a master of magical realism like Garcia, without doubting your own sanity. You will learn to laugh when you should be crying and cry when you should be laughing. In short, at times reading a book like this can be a life altering experiance :)

One hundred years of Solitude is easily his best book : a story about the island of Maconda depicted on an epic level ending with its ultimate disappearance. An extract from the book : . . . for it was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth. (422 ).

read an interesting lecture on this book -> www.mala.bc.ca.

Learn more of Julio Cortazar, the argentine master of the fantastic short story -> kirjasto.sci.fi.

An extract, "'It's like a waiting room, life is,' said the bald gentleman, carefully grinding out his cigarette with his shoe and examining his hands as if he didn't know what to do with them now; the elderly lady sighed a yes born of long years of agreeing, and put away her little bottle just as the door at the end of the corridor opened and the other lady came out with that look all the others envied, and an almost sympathetic goodbye when she got to the exit.' (from 'Second Time Around')

Read an excerpt from German Master of Magical Realism, Gunter Grass -> www.randomhouse.com.

A couple of extracts, Often after airing he finds time to sit by my bed for a while, disentangling his strings, and spreading silence until I call the silence Bruno and Bruno silence.

I shall begin far away from me; for no one ought to tell the story of his life who hasn't the patience to say a word or two about at least half of his grandparents before plunging into his own existence.

and how can I forget our own Salman Rushdie and his Midnight's Children, that fantastic interpretation of Midnight, August 15, 1947.

An extract, Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. Suppose yourself in a large cinema, sitting at first in the back row, and gradually moving up, row by row, until your nose is almost pressed against the screen. Gradually the stars' faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality. read more of him -> www.trill-home.com.

Have fun.