Current fiction on my bedside table is Anna Karenina (Tolstoy). I'm only about 100 pages in, but I was struggling with keeping the characters straight.
In my reading history there are only two (fiction) books that I've ever started but not yet finished. The first is The Temple of My Familiar (Alice Walker), the second is One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez). No real reason for stopping the Walker text, but I am very able to pinpoint the issue I had with the Garcia Marquez read. The story in One Hundred Years encompasses the lives of 7 generations of Buendias. Almost all of the men share some part of their first or second names in common. Add to this the author's choice to deal with the timeline in a frequently changing and ambiguous way, and the story becomes very confusing. The foremost confusion, for me, was who was who. That is, I had a lot of difficulty keeping the characters straight.
This is the same trouble that had confronted me in the early pages of Anna. In the early pages, Levin and Stepan are dining together and Tolstoy refers to Stepan alternately as Oblonsky (unbeknownst to the innocent reader, however). Although it seemed appropriate to the story that only the two be dining together, I couldn't shake the feeling that Stepan, Levin and Oblonsky were taking up a table for three.
I found the following tip, from Sparknotes very helpful:
Each Russian has a first name, a patronymic, and a surname. A person’s patronymic consists of his or her father’s first name accompanied by a suffix meaning “son of” or “daughter of.” Hence, Levin is addressed as Konstantin Dmitrich (son of Dmitri), Kitty is called Ekaterina Alexandrovna (daughter of Alexander), and so on. Characters in the novel frequently address each other in this formal manner, using both the first name and patronymic.The other thing is, that some of the characters, particularly the male characters, are often referred to by their surnames only (just like in real life!)When characters do not address each other formally, they may use informal nicknames, or diminutives. Sometimes, these nicknames bear little resemblance to the characters’ full names. For instance, Levin is sometimes called Kostya (the standard nickname for Konstantin), and Vronsky is sometimes called Alyosha (the diminutive of Alexei).
It would be interesting to find out whether these naming conventions are still commonplace in Russia today.
I think one of the reasons so many english speaking readers had this same difficulty with "one hundred years" is there are slight differences in the spanish language versions of names that signify Jr., the 3rd etc which are not translatable. Also, to truly distinguish between the characters of the same name one must pay attention to the actions , for it is the personalities Marquez builds that allow for slight differences to be noticeable despite the timeline. Lastly, Marquez utilizes this timeshifting technique in quite a few of his books, to purposefully disorient the reader, going so far as to change narrative perspectives from the same character throughout "Autumn of the Patriarch."
ReplyDelete