LITERATURE: 100 Years

I have just gotten a few pages into Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude but I’m already enchanted by it. How can you not love a character who, from a gypsy who brings to the small village of Macondo the wonders of the world, buys a telescope and sees its potential :

"(Jose) would spend hours on end in his room, calculating the strategic possibilities of his novel weapon until he succeeded in putting together a manual of startling instructional clarity and an irresistible power of conviction.  He sent it to the government, accompanied by numerous descriptions of his experiments and several pages of explanatory sketches….

In spite of the fact that a trip to the capital was little less than impossible at that time, Jose Arcadio Buendia promised to undertake it a soon as the government ordered him to so that he could put on some practical demonstrations of his invention for the military authorities and could train them himself in the complicated art of solar war."

I love this man.  I love anyone who looks at something and finds something new in it, in this case, the ability to cause fires and wound armies by concentrating the heat of the sun through the lenses.  His idea is, of course, ridiculous, but what dedication, what concentration, what hope!

(Note:  Until I figure an easier way of using the correct Spanish diacritical marks, please, just as with my reviews of Facade, bear with me.)