Book Review 2: The General in His Labyrinth

People like writing about things they feel comfortable talking about. Either if it is because they know a lot about what they are talking about, or they understand it really well or if it is some other reason, they write really good things. This is  why Gabriel Garcia Marquez decided to write The General in His Labyrinth.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Colombia. As a kid, Gabriel Garcia Marquez went through many struggles. He had to deal with death, and also moving a lot from place to place.  After he was born, his father became a pharmacist and in order to make money to support his family he had to move to Sucre, Bolivia to work as a pharmacist, but he took his wife with him to work in Sucre because it would have been really hard for him to make enough money to support his family. They left Marquez with his grandparents. Marquez grew up with his grandparents and knew them more than he knew his own parents. His grandfather was the one who started teaching Marquez how to read and to write, which eventually became Marquez's favorite thing to do. He told Marquez stories which made Marquez think deeply shaping his mind as a thinker and as a writer. Marquez's biggest struggle as a kid (when he was nine) was the death of his grandfather. That changed his whole life permanently and he ended up moving with his parents to Sucre,  Bolivia where his father owned a pharmacy after having lived nine years with his grandparents.  In Sucre, Bolivia he continued with his writing and eventually he realized he wanted to be a journalist.

He went to the University of Cartagena where his career as a journalist began. Marquez really liked to write about historic events and stories based in real experiences or events. One of the people he really wanted to write about was about Simon Bolivar. He read an unfinished book by his friend who was a writer Alvaro Mutis, which was about Simon Bolivar's last voyage. The story took place in Magdalena River, Colombia. Marquez felt really interested about the book and the story for two reasons: because he wanted to write about Simon Bolivar and because as a kid, he grew up living by the Magdalena River. He knew a lot about the setting so he asked permission to Mutis to take his idea and to write about Simon Bolivar and his last voyage in the Magdalena River, Colombia. That is how he ended up writing the book The General in His Labyrinth. He felt connected to the story because he knew about some of the characters and he knew the place. That made his book even better because he actually knew what exactly he was talking about.

  Had Bolivar not existed, Mr. Garcia Marquez would have had to invent him. Seldom has there been a more fitting match between author and subject. Mr. Garcia Marquez wades into his flamboyant, often improbable and ultimately tragic material with enormous gusto, heaping detail upon sensuous detail, alternating grace with horror, perfume with the stench of corruption, the elegant language of public ceremony with the vulgarity of private moments, the rationalistic clarity of Bolivar's thought with the malarial intensity of his emotions, but tracing always the main compulsion that drives his protagonist: the longing for an independent and unified South America. This, according to Bolivar himself, is the clue to all his contradictions. -The New York Times:Book Review

It is like Gracia makes up his own stories. Stories that are real he can make them seem like he wrote them. That is how good his writing is. 

The cycle of daughters and mothers

Mothers influence their daughters to become like them when their daughters grow up, but they don't always do it directly. Sometimes they kind of force their daughters to do whatever they think their daughters should do, in other words, they make the decisions for their daughters so that when they are older, they are shaped similar to them.

In the short stories from The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, The mothers in most of the stories treat their daughters in a very similar way. They make their daughters do things that they want them to do and not actually what the daughters want to do.

I think that this is a big part of the Chinese culture, and i also think that it could be part of other cultures around the world but the Chinese are the ones that show it the most.

In the story Rules of The Game, Waverly Jong is the daughter of a mother who tells her what to do, what is according to her what will make Waverly a successful person. Waverly learns by herself that she is good at something; playing chess. She slowly starts to show the people around her the big talent she has. Once her mother sees that her daughter is doing something with her life by herself, she interferes and starts pressuring her daughter to work harder on her chess skills, which just makes it hard for Waverly to be able to do good.

 As her men drew closer to my edge, i felt myself growing light. I rose up into the air and flew out the window. Higher and higher, above the alley, over the tops of tiled roofs, where i was gathered up by the wind and pushed up toward the night sky until everything below me disappeared and i was alone. (pg. 101)

Eventually, her mother caused Waverly to quit chess. Her mother was just trying to help her with her pushing, but Waverly could not take it. This mother was trying to make her daughter be what she wanted her to be and did not let her deal with her dream independently causing her to quit what she was so good at.

One of the main characters, Suyuan Woo who died from a brain aneurysm years after she moved from China and lived in the US. She created the Joy Luck Club, and she got a group of women to join her (They were Chinese too). After her death, the other women that formed part of the Joy Luck Club saw Jing-Mei Woo as the next leader of the group. They kind of expected her to continue what her mother had started.

'You are responsible', said my mother. (pg. 28)

This doesn't show how the women from the club wanted her to replace her m,other, but that does show how the mother, Suyuan, talked to Jing-Mei, telling her that she is responsible. This kind of shows that her mom considers her or could consider her responsible for whatever she leaves behind when she dies, in this case the club.

Mothers influence their daughters in life, they want them to turn out a certain way, but they pick the way they'll turn out and the daughters are dependent on doing things from their mothers.

The ever-cahnging story...

In this first story, Suyuan Woo always changes the ending of the stories of the dream because i think she is trying to send her daughters a message.
The message i think she Suyuan Woo is trying to send her daughters is that their lives are not going to be like their dreams. That they have to make their own lives and live them by what is real.
In her dream, everything was happy and peaceful and it was the perfect place for anyone, or at least for her. There were rivers in Kweilin. There were peaks that were white mists, and beds of soft moss and laugh. Nothing could ever go wrong in that place.
The endings of the stories always seem to be bad, as if they are not part of the dream. For example, Suyuan Woo says that since she was so rich, that money was not worth anything after she won it. I am not completely sure if money is one of the things that makes Suyuan Woo happy, but i bet it would be one. If money makes her happy, and now is not worth anything, not even more than toilet paper as she said, then her dream must be collapsing.
I do not think that she herself lived her life as a real situation, she lived it as if it was a dream. Maybe she is trying to tell her daughters to not have the same life that she had. That is what i meant by living life by what is real and not by their dreams.
I guess that is what she tried to do by telling them different stories. And that is what parents do usually. They learn from their mistakes and do not want their children to make the same they made. I think that Suyuan Woo was a different person in her dreams than in real life. This reminds me of inception, because its like there are dreams within a dream which is not exactly what happens here but in a way they are all different dreams that connect.