In society

Read Markes!

November 26, 2009 Viktor Shenderovich

Once I have already shared impressions of fresh re -reading with a respectable audience

Colombian classic. It was then about the novel "Badge time". And here is a new vacation, and a battered volume in a vacation suitcase: “A hundred years of loneliness”, a novel that I did not look into, go, twenty years ...

However, more recently, I would not be able to fully appreciate some of his pages - for example, dedicated to how a lonely, quiet young man who has nothing against the government and not even particularly suspecting his existence, becomes Colonel Aurelo Buendia, head of the rebels ...

I do not apologize for a long quote: it will give you pleasure - at least literary:

“The elections passed calmly. On Sunday, at eight in the morning, a wooden urn was installed on the square under the protection of six soldiers. (...) At four in the afternoon, the drum fraction announced the end of the vote, and Don Apolinar Moskota sealed the urn with his signature. In the evening, sitting behind the party in Domino with Aureliano, he ordered the sergeant to tear the label and calculate the voices. There were almost as many pink pieces of paper as blue, but the sergeant left only ten pink and replenished the shortage of blue. Then the urn was sealed with a new label, and the next day the light was taken to the main city of the province a little.

“The liberals will start the war,” said Aureliano. Don Apolinar did not even look up from his chips. “If you think that due to the substitution of ballots, then no,” he objected. “After all, a little pink in the urn remained so that they could not complain.” Aureliano understood all the disadvantage of the opposition. “If I were a liberal,” he remarked, “I would have started a war because of this story with pieces of paper.” Father -in -law looked at him on top of his glasses.

“Ay, Aureliano,” he said, “if you were a liberal, you would not have seen how to change pieces of paper, be you at least a hundred times with my snake. (...)

When Gerrineldo Marquez and Visbal Magnfalo (...) asked who he was liberal or conservative, Aureliano did not hesitate for a minute.

-If you must be someone, then I will be better than a liberal, because conservatives are scammers ... "

After a few pages of the novel, it begins - and lasts a lot, many pages further - the civil war. Colombian riot, meaningless and merciless. The stupidity of the authorities and the rage of rebels, multiplying, raising spilled blood, is most often innocent ... All this is because of the lazy self-confidence of the authorities, because of the Swins, that everything will get away with his hands, as it came off yesterday, due to contempt for the people, who passed a certain invisible limit and became suddenly obvious.

Rivers of blood are also a feedback form. Almost inevitable in cases where the authorities do not agree to feedback in the form of sheets of the wrong color, in the form of political evolution. Here, in fact, is the whole simple choice - between Macondo and Yoknapatofa, Latin American hows and General de Gaulle, Timishoar and Prague, Andizhan and Washington ...

Some time after the beginning of bloodshed, the power begins to twitch. The obvious comes to her - something that she did not want to understand Domino behind her party, while Sergeant Churov took pink pieces of paper in the next room and fell asleep there.

Power begins to depict a political process - mainly in order to recover and regroup forces. Here comes a happy time for the "system" liberals. They are temporarily stopped shooting, they begin to talk to them - almost like equals! Oh joy! Oh, sweet minutes of involvement in big politics!

“... Colonel Aureliano Buendia imagined these those dressed in black lawyers - how they leave the presidential palace in the ice cold of the early morning, raise their hands to the ears, rub their hands, whisper and hide in gloomy night cafes to discuss what the president wanted to say when he said“ yes ”, or what he said, when he said“ no ”, and even give a guess about the fact that he said that he said. The president thought when he said the opposite of what he thought ... "

The time of presidential audiences and the design of the capital's cafes clearly do not coincide with ours, the rest ... therefore, say, Colombia of the middle of the last century?

... The paper cover came off in the process of another re-reading-nothing, a couple of times there are enough books. You can, of course, buy a new one, but I don’t want to: it is so nice to deal with the old, personally baked volume.

Pravda Pravda, 1987. The annotation says: the novel has an acute anti -imperialist orientation ...