La Hojarasca

June 8, 2010

My Literature of Latin America class (Ruthi, Roxanne, myself) finished our first book today. “La Hojarasca,” written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It was pretty abstract, suffered from a discontinuous narrative, and of course was written entirely in Spanish. That mixture of factors didn’t really enhance anyone’s comprehension. If anyone read “The Dew Breaker” in Bethel’s CIC class, it was very similar. Reading it was so frustrating – we often spent 2 or 3 or even 4 hours on it each night, just to read eight or ten pages! Nearly every other word had to be looked up in a dictionary and the sentence phrasing was very different from what I was used to. In addition, turns out it was an extensive commentary on the human condition, an allegory of Colombia, and contained huge amounts of symbolism. I hate symbolism. I’m sorry, all you English majors, I’m sure you’re all collectively writhing on the floor and gnashing your teeth, but that’s how it goes. Give me a lab write-up, a research paper, a straight-up novel, theology, anything but symbolic literature. But now we’re reading Isabel Allende, a Chilean author, and she is so much easier to comprehend.

We visited a cemetery and the city landfill today. The cemetery was VERY interesting, so much different from those in the U.S. It was almost completely full of crypts, very elaborate, too. There were also long walls of vertically stacked tombs, kind of like a chest of drawers. Those were for the poorer people, the ones who didn’t have oodles of cash to drop on a private plot in the cemetery. There were also separate areas for different cultures, such as Chinese, Americans, Germans, and Jews, many of which came during the last 100 years, and were invited by the government to help build infrastructure or business.

The landfill was in a large ravine right next to the landfill. It was full of people, trucks, and buzzards. Quite a few people make their living there, digging out recyclables from the trash and reselling them to the different companies. As of only a year ago, only adults may work in the landfill – the government outlawed children, on the grounds that it was too dangerous, which is definitely a step in the right direction.