Reading books is an intensely personal exercise. One of the reason why many don’t like it. When you read the book the world outside stops and you are immersed in the world the book creates. A good book actually obliterates the line which separate the real world and the world it creates.
I don’t remember how I started on the Latin American literature. By habit, I read a book and find all the books I can around it’s central theme or author, and read more books around it. This has worked well in terms of exploring what I like in an much easier way. And there was a period where I took stock of the writers in all major languages in the world and came up with a list of authors to read. However, this list does not have Marquez at that time.
And the first book I read is 'One hundred years of solitude' and the world it introduced was just spectacular. The use the city of Macando as a character in the story was something I was mesmerized with. There was nothing like that I've read earlier. And my love affair with Gabriel Garcia Marquez started.
So it was that I ended up reading 'Love in the Time of Cholera'. It was such an unusual book. Just as the city becomes a character, here it is Love and Time which becomes a character of such intricacy and neatness. The love story starts - or continues - when the protagonists are actually in a very old age and goes towards an end through a series of flashbacks into the story of their lives.
The seductive nature of the story lies in its treatment of Love and the narration which itself feels like walking in and out of multiple dreams. The absurdity of a pure love, Ariza hears about the death of Urbino when he was lying naked with a prostitute and rushes of to profess his love to Fermina while she is preparing for the funeral of Urbino, her husband. What is pure here? The physical love or the more complicated spiritual love? The whole absurdity of this first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book.
Reductio ad absurdum is what explains love. When reduced to the basic logicality of expression, Love feels like absurdity. And this is what the book brings out brilliantly. As a love story, it cannot be more absurder than that - Ariza waiting in the wings for wooing Fermina again, while she completes a full life with her husband. And Ariza is not chaste in his waiting either, though he professes innocence to Fermina all along, he goes through a series of women like there is no tomorrow and there is no guarantee that he will stop that behavior when Fermina accepts him.
If all that, then what good is the book? The book works precisely because it brings out all that. There is no perfect love - as there are no perfect human beings - what we have only a broken life, where it is impossible to give anyone a perfect love, we make mistakes, fall mightily and try to rise, say or do the wrong thing again and again and yet the only thing that makes all that tolerable to live through is the love we have for the other. Without that tolerable entity to overlook the faults of one, it would be an impossible proposition to live a life of any magnitude. To me, that is the whole point of this book.
Ariza's faults are many - but he survives all that through the love he has for Fermina. Though it sounds cheesy to read that, the book works through the magical writing of Marquez and the witty humor that is spread all through the book.
The movie version of the book - for those of you not patient enough to read - remains true to the book and is probably one of the best adaptions of film, I've seen.
The book works for anyone who is a romantic at heart and still have a childish belief in Love being a cure for all the ills of life. There is nothing that can cure that kind of romanticism, of course and for those of us who are such, Marquez is a demi-god.
I don’t remember how I started on the Latin American literature. By habit, I read a book and find all the books I can around it’s central theme or author, and read more books around it. This has worked well in terms of exploring what I like in an much easier way. And there was a period where I took stock of the writers in all major languages in the world and came up with a list of authors to read. However, this list does not have Marquez at that time.
And the first book I read is 'One hundred years of solitude' and the world it introduced was just spectacular. The use the city of Macando as a character in the story was something I was mesmerized with. There was nothing like that I've read earlier. And my love affair with Gabriel Garcia Marquez started.
So it was that I ended up reading 'Love in the Time of Cholera'. It was such an unusual book. Just as the city becomes a character, here it is Love and Time which becomes a character of such intricacy and neatness. The love story starts - or continues - when the protagonists are actually in a very old age and goes towards an end through a series of flashbacks into the story of their lives.
The seductive nature of the story lies in its treatment of Love and the narration which itself feels like walking in and out of multiple dreams. The absurdity of a pure love, Ariza hears about the death of Urbino when he was lying naked with a prostitute and rushes of to profess his love to Fermina while she is preparing for the funeral of Urbino, her husband. What is pure here? The physical love or the more complicated spiritual love? The whole absurdity of this first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book.
Reductio ad absurdum is what explains love. When reduced to the basic logicality of expression, Love feels like absurdity. And this is what the book brings out brilliantly. As a love story, it cannot be more absurder than that - Ariza waiting in the wings for wooing Fermina again, while she completes a full life with her husband. And Ariza is not chaste in his waiting either, though he professes innocence to Fermina all along, he goes through a series of women like there is no tomorrow and there is no guarantee that he will stop that behavior when Fermina accepts him.
If all that, then what good is the book? The book works precisely because it brings out all that. There is no perfect love - as there are no perfect human beings - what we have only a broken life, where it is impossible to give anyone a perfect love, we make mistakes, fall mightily and try to rise, say or do the wrong thing again and again and yet the only thing that makes all that tolerable to live through is the love we have for the other. Without that tolerable entity to overlook the faults of one, it would be an impossible proposition to live a life of any magnitude. To me, that is the whole point of this book.
Ariza's faults are many - but he survives all that through the love he has for Fermina. Though it sounds cheesy to read that, the book works through the magical writing of Marquez and the witty humor that is spread all through the book.
The movie version of the book - for those of you not patient enough to read - remains true to the book and is probably one of the best adaptions of film, I've seen.
The book works for anyone who is a romantic at heart and still have a childish belief in Love being a cure for all the ills of life. There is nothing that can cure that kind of romanticism, of course and for those of us who are such, Marquez is a demi-god.
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