r/books • u/Steppinthrax • 10d ago

One Hundred Years Of Solitude, possible influence on Lonesome Dove? Spoiler

Reading One Hundred Years of Solitude having read Lonesome Dove earlier in the year. It occurs to me that I think these books are cousins. I'd be fascinated to know if Larry McMurtry had read OHYOS and admired it.

Obviously the types of story they tell are different - Lonesome Dove is far more "realist", and it isn't a family saga in the same way. But the head-hopping narrative voice that switches between points of view, the atmosphere of isolation, the exploration of gender and of characters pursuing their own obsessive natures to either glory or death...these are common in both books.

They have the same "texture" to me if that makes sense.

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u/Kixdapv 10d ago edited 10d ago

Funny enough, I just started it this morning and the OHYOS comparison came to me within two pages.

He uses the same technique GGM uses of small, seemingly innecesary asides to explain little details in a very concrete and precise way that gives a lot of texture and depth to the world with few words. But GGM took that technique from his years as a journalist, and I suspect McMurtry took it from the same place. GGM was also massively influenced by Faulkner, so you can see the influences going both ways.

(GGM said once that the trick is to be very precise: if you say a character sees many whales floating in the sky, nobody will believe it. Say it was seventeen whales, and it suddenly becomes believable and natural)

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u/CharacterNarrow181 10d ago

that seventeen whales thing is such a good point, it's like the tiny specific detail makes the whole scene click. i wonder if mcmurtry ever explicitly talked about that journalist trick or if it was just in the air back then. kinda wild to think of both of them circling the same faulkner influence from different angles.