Opinion by Sonia Beltran (Myspace.com) Time in Literature

Wed, 2006-08-30 08:01 — kristendom

Latin Americans have a different sense of time from Americans. To them, â€œmaÃ±anaâ€ means in the near and far future, never tomorrow. While Americans are impatient, unwilling to wait, Latinos wait things out. Then from the future they long for an earlier time. With this preamble in mind, we can begin to understand their time. Garcia Marquez packs in one hundred years of teeming life into an instant of insufferable solitude. Likewise Borges turns one minute into a year for a character to finish writing his play and not leave it undone as he is about to die. Cortazar in a short story splices an Aztec war with a motorcycle ride in the Twentieth Century. And this is no exaggeration: Marciano Guerrero in his debut novelâ€”The Poison Pillâ€”turns an instant into eternity when God allows the protagonist to see the seventh day for which thereâ€™s no evening, or night, or motionâ€”only God. Eternal peace. Is time an illusion for us Americans and reality for Latinosâ€”or vice versa?

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