Date: 23 March 2014
Location: Pat & Carol
It was a very nice, though cool, Sunday afternoon as the Bookers journeyed to Pat and Carol’s for our monthly meeting to discuss Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera.
It was a good turnout, with 18 Bookers in attendance, and maybe half of us had read the book — or at least most of it. Even though Marquez was a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, only a few of us had actually read any of his works before. A couple had tackled his One Hundred Years of Solitude and didn’t especially like it, so it was with some misgivings that we decided to read this book. It turns out, however, that most of us seemed to have enjoyed it, or at least to have felt it was worth the time and effort to work our way through it.
The basic plot of the story is simple: young Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza fall in love; Fermina falls out of love and later marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino; some fifty years later Urbino dies trying to re-capture his pet parrot; Florentino then begins his renewed and eventually successful efforts to woo Fermina; and the book ends with the lovers steaming up and down the Magdalena, flying the yellow flag of cholera.
Of course such a summary almost trivializes the huge achievement of this 348 page book — which is full of irony, humor, tragedy, and appalling behavior, such as Florentino’s affair with his 14 year old ward. There were many hilarious, and some not so funny, incidents throughout the book describing the three principal characters and their evolving relationships among each other. We also wondered about such things as the names that Marquez gave to some of his less important characters — did he intend these to have some under-lying meanings?
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is Marquez’s incredible style and his wonderful sentences. In our readings we often comment on the particular style of individual authors and wonder how they develop these skills. It is mind-boggling to think of someone sitting down and, out of their imagination alone, creating a work like this book. We all realized of course that Marquez wrote the book in Spanish, and we wondered how much of the style was Marquez’s and how much was due to the translator, Edith Grossman. Gina, our only member with real Spanish capability, declared that the translation appeared to follow the original text very closely. Gina even read a short passage in the original Spanish, but most of us could not understand any of it. Nevertheless, whether in Spanish or in English, this is an amazing book.
Following our discussions, we all partook of a major feast. Carol had set the theme with Caribbean pulled pork, and everyone pitched in with all sorts of good stuff — including of course eggplant, which Fermina Daza initially hated but learned to love. Eventually, we had all eaten our fill and it was time to leave, and we all traveled home with full bellies and full hearts.
— Bob