Book Twenty-Nine - Love In The Time Of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez

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Love In The Time Of Cholera is about pride - and about prejudice. I underestimated this book, I think because I didn't trust where Marquez was taking me. The last hundred pages flew by. Before that it was simply a discussion of life and love. I see now that Marquez presented clues in all those pages... he told me that one character is desperate without saying he was so. Marquez said it through narrative rather than dialogue, but I got the message. The title is so poignant!

One thing I am continually grateful for is that I was born in an era when women have choices. We no longer live in a time in which we must marry before twenty-two or face the rest of our lives as old maids destined to live with a sibling and his/her family. We can marry yet not lose our identities like the widows of this book who wanted to die when their husbands died because they never had an identity of their own and suddenly were left without the only selves they had known for most of their lives - half of a couple. 

For women there were only two ages: the age for marrying, which did not go past twenty-two, and the age for being eternal spinsters: the ones left behind. The others, the married women, the mothers, the widows, the grandmothers, were a race apart who tallied their age not in relation to the number of years they had lived but in relation to the time left to them before they died.

And woe be unto the widow or widower who wants to remarry! I'm not sure how old you have to be to realize that love has no age limit. It seems that when we're young we cannot imagine anyone over the age of ____ (fill in the blank with whatever age seems old to you right now; that age tends to increase in proportion to your own age) being in love, wanting companionship and/or possibly enjoying a physical relationship.

How do you make love last? How do you get over a lost love? This book discusses so many things - the history of Columbia, deforestation, double standards, business relations, making a "good" match, religion, ceremony, and mostly, life and love.

The calendar provided inspiration for me to finish this one - I want to start David Copperfield for the Two Bibliomaniacs books to movies challenge. Good old Dickens - at least I know what to expect with him. I know that I shall meet a character who is saintly against all odds, bless him.

P.S. In between reading sessions of this book I listened to the audio book of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. It was brilliant!

Cholera Schmolera

Reading this book is such a chore! I’m determined to finish it because I don’t hate it  - but I'm definitely not a fan. It’s all narrative - sentences, paragraphs, pages of narrative with a little bit of oh-by-the-way you know that doll you put on your bed? It’s, like, growing and stuff. Seriously, dude, the dress is getting shorter and it’s not because it shrank in the wash.

There are some gems hidden amongst the thorns. A mother cares for her sick son and discovers that he is lovesick – “The symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.” Um, all righty then.

So – is this book supposed to be one big metaphor? I don’t know. It feels like work reading it, but when I do get into reading I can continue for some time. But the lack of desire to pick the book back up means I’ve still only read 131 pages!

I've been doing... other stuff. I watched the BBC's Cranford and smiled when a rather stodgy character distastefully remarked that Dickens is "popular fiction." Isn't it odd that some people assume anything widely appreciated has no intrinsic merit?

Book Twenty-Nine - Love In The Time Of Cholera - Part One

Thus far, this book is frustrating. It’s 95% back-story and there are so many characters that I can’t keep up. I just spent 42 pages reading about someone who then exits stage left. Seriously? I’m guessing the characters are introduced and then Marquez goes back in time and we learn about what they did after we learn what became of them.

Cholera is transmitted in two ways: unhygienic conditions or contaminated shellfish (particularly raw oysters). Marquez is Columbian and the book’s setting is somewhere in the Caribbean, so it may have been the Columbian coast. I suppose we shall learn how this early character helped stop a cholera epidemic there.

Of course, a new character has just been introduced – I had to look back to see if I’d heard of him before and I had not. So I’m not sure what that’s about.




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