Sometimes a book is like a river – or a bus ride. I read The Autumn of the Patriarch by Garcia Marquez on the Ottawa city bus each day on my way to work as a consultant at the Bell Canada offices downtown. I would have approximately thirty minutes to read as the bus wound its way through rush-hour traffic. The Autumn of the Patriarch, a profile of a tyrant and his death in an unnamed South American country, is written using extremely long sentences (some go on for pages), no paragraph markings, and with an intensity and unity that can be compared to the flow of a great river that reflects the fetid jungles lining its shores.
Each day, when I took my seat on the bus, I would submerge myself again in that river of words, always the same river, but never quite the same river (like the fecund, complex repetition of the alphabet or, indeed, our daily lives). The river of words resembled the bus trip I took over and over again, every morning, in the flow of daily traffic. The river going on, always the same, always changing.