Speed reading has recently been a thing here on HN, and I think these passages beautifully illustrate the shortcomings of those techniques. I've always been a very fast reader, and it was quite difficult for me to figure out how to appreciate this kind of literature.

I can easily absorb information from man pages, and get a lot of enjoyment out of more intellectual fiction like what Charlie Stross or Alastair Reynolds write, but it's a whole different skill-set to read and enjoy writing like this. Marquez' style really requires you to turn off large parts of your information-processing brain, and just listen to the narration like it was someone else reading a story to you.