, Author at Post Road Magazine

On One Hundred Years of Solitude

Richard Z. Santos

No novel needs a recommendation less than Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel floats above every novel, perfect and removed like Remedios the Beauty, while simultaneously serving as a foundational piece for the Latin American “boom,” modern family epics, and somehow both realism and magical realism.

I don’t feel the need to defend García Márquez or to introduce his novel to a new reader. People tend to find this novel when they need it. But I do want to explore how García Márquez pulled this off.

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a demanding book that requires your full attention. Of course readers get swept away by the Buendia family and find themselves immersed in Macondo. Still, I doubt even its staunchest supporters would call it a breezy read or the kind of book you can knock out in a couple days on the beach.

The novel requires you to read its long sentences slowly and then to reread as the narrative jumps from person to person and across the generations all within a few pages. Whose head am I in? Which Aureliano is this? The novel casts off less attentive readers with its branching story and assertive narrator who seems to spend as much time describing what the characters are feeling as showing us.

This narrative structure has been called circular, recursive, branching, atemporal, and compared to spirals and tree roots tangling underground. Imagine anything complex and interlocking and you’ll find someone somewhere comparing it to One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Countless dissertations have been written on García Márquez’s masterpiece and how it achieves its unique power, but I want to focus on how each chapter begins. I think there’s a lesson here for writers and readers. If you can, read them aloud:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attached Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Úrsula Iguarán’s great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove.

Pilar Ternera’s son was brought to his grandparents’ house two weeks after he was born.

The new house, white, like a dove, was inaugurated with a dance.

Aureliano Buendía and Remedios Moscote were married one Sunday in March before the altar Father Nicanor Reyna had set up in the parlor.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía organized thirty-two armed uprisings and he lost them all.

The war was over in May.

Sitting in the wicker rocking chair with her interrupted work in her lap, Amaranta watched Aureliano José, his chin covered with foam, stropping his razor to give himself his first shave.

Colonel Gerineldo Márquez was the first to perceive the emptiness of the war.

Years later on his deathbed, Aureliano Segundo would remember the rainy afternoon in June when he went into the bedroom to meet his first son.

The marriage was on the point of breaking up after two months because Aureliano Segundo, in an attempt to placate Petra Cotes, had a picture taken of her dressed as the Queen of Madagascar.

Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo did not know where their amazement began.

In the bewilderment of her last years, Úrsula had had very little free time to attend to the papal education of José Arcadio, and the time came for him to get ready to leave for the seminary right away.

Meme’s last vacations coincided with the period of mourning for Colonel Aureliano Buendía.

The events that would deal Macondo its fatal blow were just showing themselves when they brought Meme Buendía’s son home.

It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days.

Úrsula had to make a great effort to fulfill her promise to die when it cleared.

Aureliano did not leave Melquíades’ room for a long time.

Amaranta Úrsula returned with the first angels of December, driven on a sailor’s breeze, leading her husband by a silk rope tied around his neck.

Pilar Ternera died in her wicker rocking chair during one night of festivities as she watched over the entrance to her paradise.

The whole novel is in these twenty sentences.

The first sentence alone contains the patriarch, his powerful son, and a reference to Melquiades, whose gypsies bring marvels to Macondo and whose words we read. From there we have the children, their spouses, women who are definitely not spouses but are treated as such, war, death, and, over the final six sentences, Macondo’s slow decline.

The sentences themselves call back to each other. The tenth sentence echoes the first. The twelfth sentence reminds us of the marvels of ice but with the melancholy awareness that the “marvelous inventions” (electricity and the train) will only speed up the town’s decline and the novel’s ending. The nineteenth sentence sweeps in full of hope only to be thoroughly extinguished by the twentieth and final sentence.

These sentences are a chronology, of sorts, and a family tree. They’re also a gift from García Márquez to himself and this is the valuable lesson for writers.

García Márquez starts each chapter with a specific character going through a specific event. After establishing an anchor in space and time he has permission to spiral around and back because he put a stake in the ground and knows where he must return. Usually these parameters exist within the same chapter, but sometimes, as in the first sentence, it’s much later.

García Márquez created a beautiful and complex book and I’d never claim to completely understand how he did it. But a key to the book’s internal logic lies in these beautiful sentences.

Richard Z. Santos is a writer and teacher in Austin. His debut novel, Trust Me, was published in March 2020. He is a Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle and served as one of the 2019 Nonfiction Judges for the Kirkus Prize. Recent work can be found in Texas Monthly, Awst Press, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads, and many more. In a previous career, he worked for some of the nation’s top political campaigns, consulting firms, and labor unions.

Camellia-Berry Grass’s Hall of Waters

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes

About six months ago, right before everything really shut down, my kid found my copy of Camellia-Berry Grass’s Hall of Waters, which I had just had Grass sign. He became fixated on it. He liked the cover, liked the author photo in the back, but most of all liked saying Berry Grass’s name. “Berry Grass,” he’d say, “Blueberry Grass, Blue Grass, Berry Trees, Berry Leaves!”

My kid is right to push and pull at Camellia-Berry Grass’s name like this. Grass loves puns, which one can see on their Twitter, but they also like taking one thing and pushing and pulling it, twisting it, lighting it up from unexpected angles. Hall of Waters does just this. It’s a book of essays, but just from its heft, you might guess poetry. I do not say this to say, “Oh, they’re essays but really they’re poetry.” What I mean is: Grass takes a form and transforms it. Many of the essays in their book are only one page, but those pages demand you sit with each sentence, one at a time.

Take, for example, the book’s opening essay, “Accountability,” which begins, “Let’s get to the point, like water does, rushing to fill all the spaces: this is about liquidity.” The essay takes up half of one page, but each line—dare I say—holds its own water. They ask us to consider spaces empty and filled, places occupied and not.

The essays are looking at Grass’s hometown, Excelsior Springs, how the town loved to erase Indigenous people and Black people from its history, how Grass’s personal history was written there, and how the water in the springs was the town’s greatest selling point and greatest lie. The essays are unflinching in how they are both critical and empathetic to the town and the townspeople, both pointing out the cracks in each story the town tells while also explaining how the cracks got there.

The book’s essays continue to think about space, not just within words, but with how they themselves take up space. Look at “The World Reduced to One Truth, Science, Such as It Is,” a letter to Donald Judd, an artist from Excelsior Springs that, as Grass writes in an earlier essay, “nobody really speaks of” in Excelsior. “Maybe it’s because you got out,” Grass wonders to Judd. In “The World,” the essay starts like a letter, directly addressing Judd, who died in 1994. But the main body of the essay reads like a poetic litany, each sentence a new line, defining “good art.” By the end, Grass pivots back to Judd, asking a series of questions about the way he made his art. Judd’s art reflects onto Grass, and the water of their words reflects back.

In “True or False,” Grass arranges quotes about the springwater across the page like their own tiny stanzas. They don’t provide any more analysis at this point. Instead, each quote hangs like a water droplet at the end of a branch, and the reader must decide if it will continue to cling or fall.

But best of all, one of my favorite things in this book, the thing I always mention to people, is Grass’s “hermit crab essays,” a term coined by Brenda Miller that describes essays that use borrowed, non-literary forms. These essays use a literal form: the Architectural/History Inventory Form from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources State Historic Preservation Office. Grass fills these forms out for their own childhood home, for example. Boxes are checked, and answers written briefly in the small space the box allows (“31. Chimney placement: Offset left”), but Grass also answers the questions in the dream state an essay allows (“11a. Historic use (if known): Horror and refuge. It was wet with booze breath & then verdant with rootgrowth. Less desperate than it was. Decorated.”) These hermit crab essays are thrilling: they let Grass press the mundane right up against trauma and love. They move the reader procedurally through a process of grief in the way that many of us must move through grief, at least initially—by having to fill out paperwork. And then, in the “cont.” sections of some questions, the essay floods the page, filling in the gaps the best that Grass can.

Hall of Waters is both a book I could never write and the book I wish I could have written. It proves that one might not require much physical space to intensely investigate a place and a history. Each small essay—each sentence—creates a swell inside you; until at some point, you burst.

Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes was born in Harrisburg, PA and has a BA in Creative Writing from Susquehanna University and an MFA from George Mason University. Her book, Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf, is out from Mason Jar Press. She has appeared in Always Crashing, The Rumpus, Cartridge Lit, Crab Fat Magazine, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She is the blog editor of The Rupture. She is one of two buds on The Smug Buds podcast.

The Light the Light the Light the Light (One + Two)

Margaret Yapp

The Light the Light the Light the Light (One)

I’m trying to pray to
god so I can stop thinking about
god & about the first uncut dick

I ever saw & tenderness & about how
horny I am & how tenderness
doesn’t matter today & won’t matter tomorrow.

I got a nosebleed during sex with a new lover.
The world’s literally on fire & we were born
into the middle. The middle of

the light. I’m sorry
for talking about birth & sorry
for talking about sex. I’m distracted &

busy & waiting for a text back. The new lover
made me squirt & then I cried
about my dad … what does abject mean?

I’m an animal in my middle.
I’m an animal digging against my middle.
Tenderness doesn’t matter only coincidence.

I don’t have time to pray. I’m busy
sending nudes to my entire contact list. I have an iPhone 6S
& I’m covered in bruises.

I want to tell you I’m kinky but I’m only anemic
& we can only witness from far away: the light

The Light the Light the Light the Light (Two)

I don’t know how to start a fire.
I only know why one might end.
Sex is only a small death

if you actually come.
I’m addicted to wondering
about my unconscious & I continue

& continue to try to find the light.
I pray to god for the light.
There is no reliable

name for any of this & we have established language
is impossible. I pray to
god my new antidepressant

makes me less horny. Am I in love
or am I just smoking weed every night?
Am I in love or am I

eating a particularly good orange? No matter
how fast we burn
I wouldn’t want to be

caught dead in the middle of a war
alone like this.
From here on out I promise

I’m only going
to let hot people hurt my feelings.

Margaret Yapp is from Iowa City, Iowa. Her poems and essays have appeared in Peach Mag, Apartment Poetry, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere. Margaret is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Find her on the internet @bigbabymarg.

Infrared

David M. Sheridan

On this fall day in Michigan, we all gather on the screened-in porch, protected
from the cold by a technologically advanced heater hung from the ceiling.
Our host explains that this space-age device generates infrared light:
“It heats objects, not the air.” At first this seems like a routine piece

of information, akin to “these muffins are sweetened with beet juice”
or “these heirloom apples are locally grown.” We raise our palms,
immersing them in the infrabeam. As promised, our skin registers warmth.
But then we try to feel the air, to learn whether it is being heated as well.

How can we tell? “It heats objects, not the air.”
Why should we care? But we do,
and wave our hands ridiculously, a vain attempt to verify
that the in-between space remains untroubled. There is no knowing

if the air is warm or if our skin is cooking via direct communication with the invisibly glowing
bulb — redder than red, or perhaps nascently red, a hue en route to obtaining true
status as a recognized color. Suddenly, the heater seems to call into question
our understanding of space itself as an everyday medium. What would it mean

for heat to be transmitted to our hands without affecting the space between,
like a sailboat that doesn’t touch the wind? Even fish, so slippery,
must create a little disturbance as their fins cut through the water.
Infrared: that category of light that allows Navy SEALS to see at night,

positioned at the spectrum’s edge, opposite ultraviolet.
“The rainbow is so much thicker than it looks,” someone quips.
Infrastructure provides a matrix of support at the bottom of our lives,
blindly shaping our momentary existence. An infralapsarian

is someone who believes Adam’s lapse lies beneath our sinful nature.
Infradian (rhymes with circadian) refers to cycles that extend beyond
a single day, that spill, like the enjambed
lines of poems, past the borders of the presumptive unit.

The world is full of infra-:
Infralanguages, composed of infrawords, allow us
to convey the infrareal.
In fact, this poem is only the shiny surface

of an infratext, a better poem that lies beneath/beside/beyond this
one, if only you could sense the sense
radiating infrareadly from the page. But that would be an infraction
against the laws of optics or semiotics

or leprechauns. Don’t ask how it works.
Be content to let it heat your hands as you hold it,
carefully, like you would hold a hot piece of aluminum foil
when you retrieve a slice of warmed-over pizza from the oven —

fingers pinching the edges, touching
as little as possible, so as not to get burned.

David M. Sheridan teaches writing and design in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities program at Michigan State University. He holds an MFA from Western Michigan University. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Parting Gifts, and other places. He is working on a collection of poetry entitled 52 Missing Poems, in which every poem is cut out of a black 3″x5″ card.

The Butterfly House + Climate Change

Adam-Scheffler

The Butterfly House

For a full month
once each year,
cops, skin cancer doctors,
and TSA agents
should be made to work
security at the insect
house of the Miami
botanical gardens,
and, positioned in the
airlock security room
between the green house
& egress, should
have to pat people
down impersonally,
extending
flat fingers, careful
not to harm the
secret beauty each
body might hold.

Climate Change

Today, I’m going to
try to impersonate an
alarm clock that others
won’t want to punch,
someone who doesn’t
get hysterical over a
headline about Miami beach
going underwater and the net
sexiness of Florida flocking
inland, or LA cosplaying
as a birthday candle,
but that also doesn’t
gaslight himself like
an old timey-miner,
moving deeper into the
darkness, with his tiny
flickering flame, so
obsessed with
admiring the lovely
berry-scrawled paintings
of bison & deer, that he
stands there doing nothing
until the light goes out.

Adam Scheffler grew up in California, received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD in English from Harvard. His first book of poems—A Dog’s Life—was the winner of the 2016 Jacar Press Book Contest. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Common, The American Poetry Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Plume, Barrow Street, Antioch Review, Sewanee Review, Verse Daily, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, and many other venues. He teaches in the Harvard College Writing Program.

This is the Light

Carl Phillips

            This is the deep light you’ve waited for, unfiltered except
now and then by the memory of your first time seeing it,
soon the night-dark after that, filling with sounds that were
strange only from your own mixed perspective as the latest
stranger to have passed through by accident, if there’s such
            a thing. Now you live here, where it’s likeliest you’ll die, too,
you’re finally old enough, not just to say, but – without
sorrow or fear, most of the time – understand the truth of it,
the mind done with signaling, letting its watch-fires, one by one,
go out: the renegade glamour of late fall, owl-ish, fox-ish, how
            brightness is and isn’t a color exactly, the one tree from a
city years ago, its weeping branches of pink-white poisonous
berries, like a vow against winter, against giving in, or as if
            the tree, to cover its nakedness, had chosen a stole of what –
when looked at closely – seem the shrunken heads of goblins
in miniature – from afar, just berries, more proof that victory
wears best when worn quietly, or it never happened, or to
someone else, I’m only trying to help you, let me help you,
            he said, something like that, unbuckling; they sailed for hours;
the water that day was as close to perfect as perfect gets here.

Carl Phillips‘s most recent book of poems is Pale Colors in a Tall Field (FSG, 2020). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.