Bibliofreakblog

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

I take heart in the fact that Gabriel García Márquez doesn’t subscribe to just one genre or style.  It gives me hope that I might like his other work, and will understand why he got the Nobel Prize in Literature.

I already kind of get it.  I imagine that if read in its original Spanish the prose of this book would  not be described as flowery (with the sickly-sweet connotation that word has when describing writing) but perhaps as floral–pretty, delicate, organic, curling, beautiful, sensory.

And perhaps if read in its original Spanish by someone more acquainted with Spanish culture and literature than I, it’s characters would not be described as idiotic.  

Magical Realism–a subject I really wish I knew more about–doesn’t, as far as I can tell, show up in this book.  There’s far-fetchedness, but nothing that has any fairy tale, otherworldly, or extraordinary qualities.  

The book has three main characters and one story line.  Pay no attention to the beginning of the book.  Again, I may be entirely missing the point here in saying that–this is an author known to leave out details in order to force the reader to pay more attention.  Flortentino Ariza and Fermina Daza are star-crossed teenaged lovers, determined to stick it out, no matter Fermina’s father’s prohibitions.  Except that they don’t stick it out.  Fermina marries Juvenal Urbino.  Over the course of fifty years, Fermina’s and Florentino’s lives occasionally intertwine.

It is the ending that I found rediculous.

For one thing, I think that you have to actually know a person–I mean really know a person–to be in love.  And adults are not the same as their teenaged counterparts.

I wouldn’t call this book chick lit.  I  mean, there’s some treasure hunting and political elements, too.  But the baseness of the characters, as well as their love (particularly Florentino’s) is the mushy fluff romance movies make their millions on.  

Maybe I’m wrong.  Someday I’ll have to ask Oprah.

If you like this book/author, you might like:

Ficciones (F) by Jorges Luis Borges
Selected Nonfictions (CNF) by Jorges Luis Borges
Caramelo (F) by Sandra Cisneros
Like Water for Chocolate (F) by Laura Esquivel
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (F) by Carlo Hijuelos
Don Quixote (F) by Miguel De Cervantes
The House of Spirits (F) by Isabel Allende
Atonement (F) by Ian McEwan
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (F) by Milan Kundera
Anna Karenina (F) by Leo Tolstoy
Pure Drivel (CNF) by Steve Martin
Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (NF) by Gerald Martin

Other works by Gabriel García Márquez*:

The Autumn of the Patriarch (F)
A Hundred Years of Solitude (F)
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (F)
The General in His Labyrinth (F)
Of Love and Other Demons (F)
Memories of My Melancholy Whores (F)
Collected Stories (F)
Living to Tell the Tale (CNF)
In Evil Hour (F)
The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor (CNF)
Leaf Storm (F)
Strange Pilgrims (F)
No One Writes to the Colonel (F)
Innocent Erendira (F)
Collected Novellas (F)
News of a Kidnapping (CNF)

With Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza:

The Fragrance of Guava: Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez (CNF)
 

*NOTE: This list is not exhaustive.  For the most part, it only includes works still in print in English, though you can still find many of his works used.

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