Happy midweek everyone! Wow. We are already halfway through the week. How time flies. How has the year been going for you so far? I hope that the year has been kind to everyone. If not, I hope you will experience a reversal of fortune in the coming months. More importantly, I hope everyone is happy and healthy, in body, mind, and spirit.

With the midweek comes a fresh WWW Wednesday update, my first this year. WWW Wednesday is a bookish meme hosted originally by SAM@TAKING ON A WORLD OF WORDS. The mechanics for WWW Wednesday are quite simple, you just have to answer three questions:

  1. What are you currently reading?
  2. What have you finished reading?
  3. What will you read next?
www-wednesdays
What are you currently reading?

Oh, how time flies. We are nearly halfway through October. Before we know it, we will be welcoming a new year. At this point, I am scrambling to finish all books on my reading challenges although I think I have more than enough time to finish all of these books. Currently, my foray into Latin American literature is in full swing. Earlier today, I started reading Nobel Laureate in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa’s Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. His seventh novel, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is my third novel by the Peruvian writer. Interestingly, this is the first that was set in his homeland. The novel is narrated by Mario, or Marito, an eighteen-year-old student. The subject of his story was his Aunt Julia. I just started reading the book earlier so I can’t share much impression on the book right now. However, I will be sharing my initial impressions in this week’s First Impression Friday update.

What have you finished reading?

My 100th book for the year was Argentine writer José Mármol’s Amalia. It was through an online bookseller that I first encountered Mármol and Amalia, said to be the Argentine writer’s magnum opus. The power the book holds cannot be underestimated as it has been integrated into the Argentine education system. Curious about what the book has in store, I included it in my 2023 Top 23 Reading List; it is the fourteenth book from the list that I have read, so far. Mármol wrote the novel while he was in exile in Montevideo, Uruguay. Across the border, Juan Manuel de Rosas ruled with an iron fist.

Originally published in serial mode, the book charted the story of the titular Amalia. The opening section, however, laid out the landscape of the Rosas regime. The succeeding sections detail the budding romance between Amalia and Eduardo Belgrano. Eduardo was the friend of Daniel, Amalia’s cousin. Daniel rescued Eduardo when Eduardo, a Unitarian, was attacked by the Federalists. Daniel enlisted the help of Amalia who opened the door of her home to the injured Eduardo. It was a turbulent phase in the recently independent nation as the denizens were divided between Unitarians and Federalists. We then read about the contours of Argentine high society where Amalia moved. But then again, Amalia is, first and foremost, a political novel. Most of the book dealt with the political landscape of Argentina shortly after it gained its independence from Spain; the novel would be a precursor to what would be known in the contemporary as dictator novels. Daniel slowly emerged as the book’s hero. He overshadowed Amalia who was pushed to the back of the reader’s consciousness. The romance and the political elements of the novel never seemed to converge. Despite its flaws, Amalia was an evocative and compulsive read about a young nation coming to grips with its realities.

Honestly, I was not planning on reading Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth. I cannot locate my copy of Vargas Llosa’s Death in the Andes prompting me to read a work by another Nobel Laureate in Literature. Don’t get me wrong, I like García Márquez and his brand of magical realism. The General in His Labyrinth is my sixth novel by the Colombian writer, making him my second most-read Nobel Laureate in Literature, tied with Japan’s Yasunari Kawabata and just behind Kazuo Ishiguro.

It was palpable that The General in His Labyrinth is a novel about a dictator or at least a man of power. This conclusion was drawn from another García Márquez novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch. Both of these novels are considered part of the aforementioned dictator novel, a subgenre of Latin American literature. The titular General is Simón Bolívar, liberator and leader of Gran Colombia. The novel is a fictionalized account of Bolívar’s last seven months. We follow him as he journeyed across the labyrinth: a South American on the throes of gaining its independence from its colonizers. The novel’s most seminal section followed Bolívar as he traced the Magdalena River. In the Author’s Notes, García Márquez admitted that his primary motivation for writing the novel lies in its setting. He is more interested in capturing the landscape of the adventure rather than in building Bolívar’s profile. It was, nevertheless, a compulsive read about a man in decline and a continent about to emerge from the ashes of its past.

What will you read next?