El Marciano (The Martian) by Andy Weir {Goodreads}
Published by Ediciones B in 2014
Paperback edition; 408 pages {BookDepository}
When a
mission on Mars goes wrong, the crew of the Ares 3 is forced to leave the
planet leaving one of them behind, presumably dead. However, the astronaut Mark
Watney is alive and now, his fight for survival begins. His only chance to be
rescued is when the next mission to Mars arrives in 4 years but he has neither
water nor food to last him that long. His best option is to try and make
contact with NASA and for that, he has a plan. This is the premise of The
Martian, the debut sci-fi novel by Andy Weir. Sounds good, doesn’t it?
Although I really enjoyed this book, I had two problems with it and I’m gonna start talking about those. First of all: the technical language. I know it’s a book about astronauts and the space and whatnot and obviously it needs to be realistic but for me it was too much. I had absolutely no idea what they were talking about most of the time and instead of feeling the realism of the novel, I felt frustrated, especially at the beginning. Then, you get used to it, kind of.
The second issue
was the translation. The writing style of the novel isn’t mind-blowing. In
fact, it’s pretty simple (which, paradoxically, was also good – but I’ll talk
about that later) and therefore, the translation is the same. It took me a bit
to get used to it as well but once I did, I was fully ready to enjoy the novel
for what it was. I feel like I should explain why I decided to read the Spanish
translation instead of the original text as I like to do if the book is
originally written in English. The reason was the language. If I had troubles
reading it in Spanish, can you imagine reading it in English? It would have
been a disaster.
Despite
these two problems, the emotions The
Martian made me feel outshined the problems. Once I was on page 170 or so,
I couldn’t put it down and in fact, I read the rest of the novel (which is 408 pages
long) in a day. It’s been a long time since a book has kept me awake
until 2 am and it was so worth it. Constant ANGST, that’s how I felt throughout
the book. My heart was beating so fast and if I was the kind of person to bite
her nails, I probably would have ended up eating my hands.
Feeling connected
to the characters didn’t help me calm down at all as well. During most of the novel we
read about Mark, and he feels very human so it’s very easy to bond with him
despite the fact we will most likely never find ourselves in that situation. He’s
also very comical, which gave me a break from time to time. The rest of the
characters, not only the crew members but the people working at NASA, were okay
too. We don’t get to know them that much, true but they do everything they can
to help Mark and it’s just beautiful.
Remember
before when I said that the simple writing style helped also the novel? Well,
it makes the story incredibly visual. I could picture everything in my head.
When people say this is like watching a movie, they aren’t exaggerating and I
just can’t wait to see the movie. So, if you were interested in reading The Martian my advice is GO FOR IT! And
if you don’t, go and see the movie because the trailer looks phenomenal and
quite faithful to the text – fingers crossed it turned out that way!
My Rating:
