Review: Love in the Time of Cholera

Written by Gabriel García Márquez
Translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman
Published by Random House/Vintage Books, 2003, 348 pp.
Originally published in Colombia, 1985
Winter Reading Challenge 2008

Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good. [p. 26]

Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the most popular and celebrated novels of the last half of the last century. It's been reviewed and reviewed, and summarized and analyzed to pieces – especially since Oprah Winfrey discovered it and added it to her book club choices.

The basic plot is really fairly simple. A unprepossessing young man (Florentino Ariza) falls deeply in love with an attractive schoolgirl (Fermina Daza), several years younger than he is. Knowing her father will disapprove, Florentino contacts Fermina by sending her a love letter and they manage to conduct a sort of secret love affair by correspondence, meeting very briefly only once or twice. This epistolary relationship lasts for several years until Fermina, now a young woman, decides she doesn't really love the young man and puts an end to it. She marries a well-to-do doctor (Juvenal Urbino) and they have a good life together until the doctor dies many years later. Florentino has many love affairs after he is rejected by Fermina. After her husband dies, Fermina is reunited with Florentino who has maintained his love for her over all the years.

Of course, that's a very bare bones description. The novel as a whole is much more complicated and rich with lush detail (in fact, lush is a good one-word description of the novel's style). The writing is very beautiful – mesmerizing, in fact; and the characters seem very human and multi-faceted. The story wanders back and forth in time and place, and follows many different points of view at different times. The themes of love as a sickness or plague (like the cholera of the title), aging and death are woven throughout the novel's twists and turns. Much of the story is very sad.

This was the last of the books on my list for the Winter Reading Challenge; and I must admit that, while I recognize that it's a beautiful book, I'm not sure I would have finished it without that Challenge connection. Since I read for pleasure, I usually don't stick with books that make me work too hard to get through them. After reading the last page, I was glad I stuck with it, but getting to that last page was a struggle sometimes.

And for that reason, I think the challenge has been a huge success for me. It's kept me reading and inspired me to branch out into subject matter I wouldn't ordinarily have chosen. I want to thank Karlene for hosting and all the other challenge members for taking part – I've really enjoyed reading all the wonderful reviews and I've picked up quite a few titles that I want to check out for my future reading lists.

Addendum (Sunday, 16 March): One thing I forgot to include in the above – my favorite character in the book was the parrot. Wish he hadn't disappeared so early in the story.

Booking Through Thursday: Playing Editor

This week's BTT topic:
How about a chance to play editor-in-chief? Fill in the blanks:
__________ would have been a much better book if ______________________.

Hmmmmm. What a question! OK, I'll play:

War and Peace would have been a much better book if the war had been about 300 pages shorter.

Moby Dick would have been a much better book without all that boring stuff about whales.

Anna Karenina would have been a much better book if Anna had pushed her husband and her lover under the train instead of jumping.

My first novel would have been a much better book if I'd ever finished writing it. (Or maybe not!)

Review: The Concord Quartet

Written by Samuel A. Schreiner, Jr.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006, 246 pp.
Winter Reading Challenge

Although the people who hallowed it were all called away, the village of Concord was – and remains – a shrine to the life of thought.

Samuel Schreiner's The Concord Quartet is a brief portrait of the group of early 19th Century Transcendentalist writers and academics who called Concord, Massachusetts, home during the period of the "American Renaissance" in arts and letters. The book focuses on four major figures: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Schreiner weaves together the individual stories of these four friends and neighbors to produce an interesting look at the intellectual life of the time and place.

This book is a good overview of the subject, not an in-depth examination. I enjoyed it, but its concentration on Emerson left me wanting to know more about the other members of the group. Well, maybe not Thoreau – the picture painted of Henry David makes him seem like a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work, but I think that's probably a pretty accurate portrayal (Mark Edmundson was exactly right when he said that "sometimes it appears that Thoreau disapproves of everything, except the drinking of cold water"). Nathaniel Hawthorne gets a bit less attention than the others, but he wasn't really resident in Concord for much of the period covered in the book. Unfortunately, he seems to be the most intriguing of them all.

I have to admit, I chose this book mainly because I'm interested in the women associated with the Concord group. Bronson Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott, one of my early favorites. And Sophia and Elizabeth Peabody were strong influences on the group – Elizabeth published some of their earliest works, and Sophia married Nathaniel Hawthorne. One of the books I'm determined to read this year is Megan Marshall's rather monumental history, The Peabody Sisters, and I think Quartet should serve as a good lead-in for that work.

Samuel Schreiner was a writer for Reader's Digest, and sometimes The Concord Quartet comes across a little like one of those condensed books put out by the Digest. What's there is interesting, but you keep wishing you could have seen what was left out.

Keep on Dancin'

Reading the Arts & Letters Daily today, I came across this nugget in an article ("Keeping Your Brain Fit") by Christine Larson, published in U.S. News & World Report, posted back in January --

A 2003 study reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, found that people over 75 who danced, read, or played board games or musical instruments also had a lower rate of dementia.
. . . the Alzheimer's Association recommends any activity that will keep you curious and learning: reading and writing, attending lectures, taking classes, even gardening.

See!!!??? It's perfectly OK for me to spend my days lost in the pages of a book (even though I still have a few years to go before I reach 75). After all, I'm doing it for my health! But maybe I should get up and shake my booty now and then, too.

Random Photo Monday

Sunset, Shenandoah National Park, July 2007.

I must be getting vacation fever again.

Sunday Salon

I just recently discovered The Sunday Salon and signed up yesterday, so this was my first official Sunday of salon-ing, and naturally it turned out to be a day when I wasn't really able to get much reading done. Must try to do better in the future.

I did spend some time reading a lot of other people's blogs, and I've really enjoyed sampling those. Otherwise, my reading activity today so far has been confined to the New York Times Book Review during breakfast. But later tonight, I'm hoping to finish up The Concord Quartet, which I've been reading as part of my Winter Reading Challenge line-up – and for pleasure, of course.

Sunday is usually our "errand" day, and reading gets put off until after dinner. But it was a great day for being out and about, so I can't complain. Still cold out – definitely still winter here in Northern Virginia. But we had lots of sun today, especially with this being the first daylight-savings day. I love daylight savings time – wish we could go on "saving daylight" all year long.

While we were out running around, I noticed the forsythia is finally starting to bloom. And this morning, two purple finches, male and female, came and hopped around on our balcony for a while, poking into the empty pots and baskets out there. Last year we had a pot of dried-up ivy plants on the balcony, and the finches came and harvested nesting material from it. Could these two possibly be remembering that stash from last year? That would make them an old married couple – a nice thought even if a ditsy one.

So spring is on its way, even though it seems to be slow in coming this year. Soon, the cherry blossoms will be out – right on time, this year, so the predictions tell us. And then the swallows and the tourists will swoop back in, and it'll be summer before I know it! Wow, here I was thinking the year was just getting started and it's already nearly over!

NBCC Awards

The National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced this week. Winner of the fiction award was The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz.

I was sort of pulling for Joyce Carol Oates's The Gravedigger's Daughter, which was one of the finalists. I've skimmed bits of the Oates book and it's on my to-read list for this year (as it was for last year!) – I've enjoyed the parts I've read so far. I've always admired JCO, even though I haven't read as much of her stuff as I'd like to – she's so wonderfully productive!

Other winners:

Autobiography – Brother, I'm Dying, by Edwidge Danticat

Biography – Stanley: The Impossible Life Of Africa's Greatest Explorer, by Tim Jeal

Criticism – The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross

Nonfiction – Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present, by Harriet Washington

Poetry – Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang