Eli Bendersky's website - Spanish

Book review: "Cien años de soledad" by Gabriel García Márquez

2008-06-09T12:59:55-07:00

(read in Spanish)

Yes, I've finished reading "One hundred years of solitude" in Spanish. I began this endeavor months ago (somewhere in mid 2007 I reckon), and today it was completed. Why did it take so long ? For a couple of reasons, I guess. First of all, I read most of it with a dictionary in hand, which made the pace excruciatingly slow (10 pages per hour or so). Second, the book is far from having a fluid plot that's easy to follow, so consuming it in large quantities can be very difficult.

Anyway, now that it's done, I'm proud of having finished it. I read the book before (6-7 years ago), in English. Even though my English was pretty good back then, the book was very difficult, as it used a lot of high language. I recall wondering how reading such a book in its native Spanish would feel - perhaps this is what triggered my desire to learn Spanish, though I'm not certain about this.

CAS (acronym of the Spanish name), as it is frequently referred to, is considered one of the most notable works of Latin literature, widely acclaimed as second only to Don Quixote. Márquez received the Nobel prize in literature for his works, of which CAS is the principal. It tells the story of the Buendía family, set in the 19th and 20th centuries in the small village Macondo (which was founded by the head of the family) in Colombia. The story deals with seven generations of the Buendías, most of which have the same name, which is a frequent criticism of the novel.

Naming all the family males either Aureliano or José Arcadio (or some variation thereof) is a deliberate trick by Márquez, to drill in the main theme of the book - which is the repetitiveness of time and history. Needless to say, it gets quite confusing at times, and if your book doesn't have a helpful family tree depicted in the beginning, consult an online resource. Otherwise, it's too easy to get lost (unless you're reading the whole book in a single sitting - but I wonder who could do that...)

Another recurring theme in the book is surrealism. Insomnia that hit a whole town for weeks, rain that lasts years, yellow butterflies, increased fecundity of farm animals, colored ants and small fish made of gold are only some of the "wacky" fantasies CAS is full of. These too, are part of the theme of eternal recurrence of patterns in the lives of the Buendías.

And it's impossible to write a review of this book without mentioning solitude and loneliness, that are perhaps the main feeling and state the author tries to transmit to his readers. How you'll understand it depends on you, and I believe that everyone can see something for himself in this theme.

Finally, I want to provide two quotes from the book I liked and that describe the book well. They're in Spanish, and I don't have enough literary pizzazz to translate them to English in a convincing way.

From the conversation of Aureliano Babilonia with Pillar Ternera close to the end:

No había ningún misterio en el corazón de un Buendía que fuera impenetrable para ella, porque un siglo de naipes y de experiencias le había enseñado que la historia de la familia era un engranaje de repeticiones irreparables, una rueda giratoria que hubiera seguido dando vueltas hasta la eternidad, de no haber sido por el desgaste progresivo e irremediable del eje.

And the last sentence in the book:

Sin embargo, antes de llegar al verso final, ya había comprendido que no saldría jamás de ese cuarto, pues estaba previsto que la ciudad de los espejos (o espejismos) sería arrasada por el viento y desterrada de la memoria de los hombres, en el instante en que Aureliano Babilonia acabara de decifrar los pergaminos, y que todo lo escrito en ellos era irrepetible desde siempre y para siempre, porque los estirpes condenados a cien años de soledad no tenían una segunda oportunidad sobre la tierra.

I'm asking myself if I like the book. I don't have the answer. There are things about it I really dislike, and some things I like beyond my own understanding. After reading it once, I took it up again, and can't be sure that I won't read it once again sometime in the future. It's still a mystery for me.

Book review: "Countdown to Spanish" by Gail Stein

2007-07-20T12:37:14-07:00

The secondary title of the book is "Learn to communicate in 24 hours".

A couple of years ago I got this book in electronic form and browsed through it for some time. I had the impression it is pretty good so I decided to purchase a paper copy and study through it. Unfortunately, my initial judgment has failed me in this case. This book isn't too good. It's quite bad, really. "With Countdown to Spanish, in just 24 hours your can learn to speak like a native in all sorts of everyday situations" - says the back cover. Yeah right !!

The first part of this book presents the Spanish language for general use, discussing basic vocabulary and grammar. It is the better part of the book, although I don't like the way of presentation used by the author. Instead of showing many examples, she just bombards the reader with grammar rules, discussing pretty complex rules early on. For example, the 5th chapter (1/5 of the way through the book) teaches the Future Perfect and Perfect Conditional tenses - some of the more complex tenses of the language, and that after only a minimal teaching of the simpler topics !

The second part of the book is the really bad one, however. It's a simple categorized dictionary, plumped into the book to bring it to 24 chapters.

What I would expect from a good book that tries to teach you some skill is a thorough set of exercises. There are exercises in this book, but they're a joke. After a long chapter explaining many concepts, the author provides 5-6 trivial questions, usually only on 1/4th of the material taught by the chapter. This is no way to teach.

The book has some nice spots here and there (the chapters on Pronunciation and Asking Questions come to mind), but all in all it's very unhelpful - you can spend your time and money better on other books.

Typing Spanish characters on a standard keyboard

2007-05-10T19:53:10-07:00

Spanish has some characters that are not in the English alphabet. It is possible to type them on Windows using Alt + numeric keypad codes. For example, typing 0241 on the numeric keypad while holding the Alt key will produce ñ. Here is a list of special Spanish characters:

Á - 0193
á - 0225
É - 0201
é - 0233
Í - 0205
í - 0237
Ó - 0211
ó - 0243
Ú - 0218
ú - 0250
Ñ - 0209
ñ - 0241
ü - 0252
¡ - 0161 (inverted exclamation mark)
¿ - 0191 (inverted question mark)

¡Sé que esto va a ser muy útil para mí!

Book review: "Los caminos de Mitan" by Luis G Prado

2005-07-22T11:34:00-07:00

I downloaded this free ebook in order to read it on my Palm. It's very small (a few dozen pages, hard to tell when reading from a Palm) and I finished it in a few days. I remember the first book I read in Spanish - was it hard ! It took me a lot of time and I barely understood what I read.

Now the situation is far better, a small book takes only a few days, I understand most of what I read and use the dictionary for words I don't understand out of context (which isn't many, perhaps 2 words per 3 sentences on average).

Anyway, this is a nice small book from the fantasy genre. The story is of a group of powerful warriors in some imaginary world, who are summoned upon by their king to serve him in a war. However, as they find out, someone else took over the throne and wants them for a completely different reason. I won't go into spoilers, but it truly is a very short book with not much content - a short story, really.

Now on to something muchlonger...

Book review: "Yo Robot" by Isaac Asimov

2005-07-12T21:16:00-07:00

Second read of this book for me, this time in Spanish...

Yo (I) Robot is Asimov's prelude to the great Robot series - a collection of short stories that shed some light on the initial development of the positronic-brain robots, the people envolved in their design and testing, and the issues arising from interacting with them.

For some reason, I didn't enjoy it this time as much as I did the first time I read it. Maybe it's because it wasn't new, maybe because I have higher demands now ? "I Robot" mainly represents the problems with the "three robotic laws" and the hideous loopholes arising from their cross-interaction. The robotic laws are an example of a "bad spec" - unclear, ambiguous, too fuzzy, inconsistent. But hey, probably the "spec" of our brains is not much better :-)

Anyway, Asimov's Foundation and Robots series are highly recommended and this book serves as an important introduction, so it's a must read for anyone serious to get into Asimov.