Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

I liked the movie, but could tell there were good parts missing. I wasn't wrong.

I really love the way Marquez tells a story. His descriptions are delightful and his characters are lovable, with all their flaws. ( )

The title of the book and the name of the author were known to me – and are no doubt known to many people – but I had absolutely no idea about the story. And while I’ve read and enjoyed some South American literature, it’s not a tradition that figures highly in my chosen reading. The book was, of course, on offer, and it’s also on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, so I thought it worth a punt. And after a diet of far too much bad high fantasy, it was surprisingly refreshing to read prose by someone who could actually put a sentence together. An old man in a South American country dies. The novel then flashes back fifty years to a fifteen-year-old girl, who is being wooed by a young man of middling means. Her father takes her on a road trip to stay with relatives inland in order to block the relationship. When she returns a couple of years later, she finds herself suddenly no longer in love with her suitor. He, however, continues to love her. She marries an urbane and wealthy doctor who studied in France. The story then follows both her paramour, and the years – decades – he spends trying to get on with his life, while loving her from afar, and her own life. She is seemingly content in a marriage that gives her everything but love. Her husband is widely admired, which is all he ever wanted. And the old suitor has a string of jobs and affairs, none of which change him in any meaningful way. It gets distinctly dodgy some three-quarters of the way in, when the suitor takes charge of a thirteen-year-old cousin, and then makes her his lover. That’s straight up paedophilia. I don’t care when and where the book was set, and whether it was even considered acceptable in that time and place – and surely it wasn’t? – but writers choose what they write about, and García Márquez chose to write about a relationship between a man in his fifties and a girl not yet fifteen years old. As for the rest… the story jumps around a little, and I got a bit lost in the internal chronology – suitor works for the telegraph office, then he lives in a brothel, then he gets a job with a telegraph office, and somewhere in there he unsuccessfully tries to retrieve some sunken treasure… The novel revels in the filth and squalor of its setting – obviously the cause of the frequent cholera outbreaks which lend the book its title – and though ostensibly about love and romance, its female characters often feel like walking plot-points. The novel has its moments, but its blithe treatment of paedophilia, not to mention honour killings. or just plain indifference to the preventable squalor and deaths of the poor, make it a hard book to read in the twenty-first century. García Márquez’s other really famous novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I suspect I’ll give it a miss. ( )

Worth reading. Sometimes the detail of these lives, folded over and over exposing different aspects was fascinating, and at other times tedious. A fantastic (in the strange sense) ending. ( )

Giving up a bit shy of halfway. It aches to leave books unfinished, but I've decided that I have too many books queueing up to be bothering with books that can't hold my interest. I'd like to say I'll pick up where I left when I have some extra extra time to spare, but I doubt it.

I enjoyed One Hundred Years Of Solitude, I think it was 2009. It was weird and wonderous. But this just struck me as a soap opera, but then written more fancifully. I don't know if it's the translation (it is not very modern, but as I recall, neither was the other one, and in that novel (100y) the old fashionedness of the language worked), or the fact that I'm not used to reading Dutch translations anymore or the lack of a magical touch that I liked a lot in Cien Años or my tastes changing over the year.

I did enjoy certain passages, but I was never enthralled, I was never sucked in, I never really cared what was going to happen next. Maybe I've grown too cynical for books about undying love, but I was bored, and growing more bored. So I'm giving up. It's a shame, I always feel like I'm missing out when I don't enjoy a classic that so many others love. But I don't think I get through another 300 pages of this, without losing valuable reading time for other books that I will enjoy more (like I did last year by insisting on finishing The Shining). Sorry Gabriel.

In fact, I grew so weary of this story and its period drama dullness, that I had to grab an antidote, injecting a much needed 10cc of silly, my old pal Douglas Adams.

( )

I wish this had been a short story, or maybe a couple of them. I thought the beginning and ending were amazing, but the middle lagged, through repetition. And while the female characters are quite fascinating, they still remain in the shadow of the men. But at least I now know where the first John Archer book got its plot idea from. ( )