Love in the Time of Cholera

I was given this book by a professor in college. He gave our entire class copies of it because we read a review of it by Thomas Pynchon (the course was Nabokov and Pynchon), which was, of course, incredibly poetic. Read it here, and I highly recommend that you do (though it does tell what happens, so if you want to avoid spoilers, wait).

Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I actually read another of Garcia Marquez's books when I was teaching a course on Forbidden Fictions, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which was a very short but, as you may be able to determine from the title, is quite the book. I loved his writing style, and as I was paying especially close attention to his craft because I was going to be teaching it, I really appreciated it. I am a little fuzzy on it now because it was three years ago (where does the time go?!), but I would like to reread it.

At any rate, even though I really liked Memories, I couldn't get myself to read Love in the Time of Cholera until recently. Even then, I had a similar experience to when I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; that is, many people whose opinion I appreciate greatly for literature had recommended it, but I just couldn't get myself committed to reading it the first few times. Love is somewhat slow to get going, and not because nothing happens - in fact, it begins with a suicide. Instead, it is Marquez's incredibly detailed writing style that is so hard to adjust to, I think, in a world of instant gratification and lack of such heavily written sentences. There is a plethora of detail and commitment to description that we tend to shy from in our reading and writing. But Marquez is so good at it that once you are accustomed to it and expect it, it is so beautifully rewarding that you wouldn't want him to use less. Except, perhaps, in the parts when he describes the less politically correct and polite activities of some of the characters, but that he attends to all that his characters experience in such detail, whether it is easy for readers or not, is part of the beauty of his writing. Sexuality is an element of every human's experience (even the unindulged) and depravity part of almost everyone's, to varying degrees. So to include it is to write a truth, even in fiction, about the human experience. It just requires the reader recognize that were their story told, these parts would be put to words and likely seem just as strange on a page.

The moment that caught me in the book was when one character exclaimed to another, "Only God knows how much I loved you." Now this is not so an incredibly creative of a line, but it was at such a poetic and almost comical moment, and such a thing to hear, that it really moved me. I suppose I was particularly susceptible to this and always am because I'm such a romantic, but at that moment I was hooked. And from then on, it was a love story. A stranger one than what we are used to, and unsettling at times, but a love story nonetheless, and is it not a pleasant surprise to read a story in which you cannot predict the outcome or course of events and twists and turns?

I think I will reread this book again after some time to see how my experience and opinion of it shifts after a different perspective and frame of mind, so for now, I leave you with some words from Pynchon's review:

It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera -- all genres, by the way, that are well represented in this novel -- but not the Big L. What that seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level of understanding, is an author's ability to control his own love for his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.