Book 7: In Evil Hour - Gabriel García Márquez

I deserve an award for reading this crusty ass book. Literally, it was a crusty, stale book, yellow, and it smelled. I got this book from the library, and I honestly believe that they've had this copy since 1979 - not even kidding.

Reading this book was torture. I hated it. It was awful. It might be because I just read 100 Years of Solitude, and these two novels are too similar. Happenings in a Latin American town. Fantastic versus Reality. Politics. Evil. Corruption. It was the same thing. And the translation was obviously very poor.

This book revolves around a Latin American village in which someone is posting gossip and rumors about respected members of the neighborhood. The translation refers to them as 'lampoons,' but lampoons means satires, and these were just writings of sheer gossip/nasty rumors. The book tracks the effect of this gossip on the village. I'm not sure what was happening because I wanted it all to end. I remember that this woman named Trinidad is obsessed with killing all of the mice in the church - that comes up a lot. There is a controlling mayor/lieutenant, the priest, the dentist, religious folk, village folk, etc. This gossip has a tremendous effect on the village; it has everyone preoccupied and leads to murder, chaos, and evil. It even leads one of the most respected men in the neighborhood to murder another esteemed man over frivolous gossip. Don't mess with the man's honor.

I forgot to mention the humor in it all-

"It was said of him that in that same bedroom he'd murdered a man he found sleeping with his wife, that he'd buried him secretly in the courtyard. The truth was different: Adalberto Asís had, with a shotgun blast, killed a monkey he'd caught masturbating on the bedroom beam with his eyes fixed on his wife while she was changing her clothes. He'd died forty years later without having been able to rectify the legend."

What is interesting about this book is that it is based on a true story. This same, very exact, identical thing happened in Márquez's village in Columbia. Embarrassing gossip was being posted all over the village, and they never found out who the culprit was. It's kind of funny. It sounds like something a bored person would do. A simple act that has extreme consequences. I can see why villagers create a big commotion over seemingly unreliable gossip. The gossip is playing with everyone's honor and reputation, and people can't deal with that.

My shortest review yet. I usually have so much to say, but I just want this to go away.