Love in a Time of Cholera: Why you shouldn’t reread your favorite books

I’m sure you’ve had this experience: you go back to reread a book that you absolutely loved when you first read it, and… Meh.

A week ago I would have told you that Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in a Time of Cholera was one of the great reading experiences of my life: a deeply romantic exploration of enduring human love. I finished rereading it for the first time in a bit over twenty years (ouch), and… Meh.

The problem for me was that, where I had been swept along by the sheer romantic ache of the central story–a couple separated in their youth who finally find love in extreme old age–on this read I found their story annoying.

The character of the woman, Fermina Daza, was still a compelling one: she’s a complex, intense, interesting woman, and you can see two men losing their hearts to her. But her husband, Dr. Urbino, only rises above being a pompous prig in her memory, and Florentino Arizo, the young man who first captured her heart, is portrayed as both an obsessive stalker and a philandering hypocrite. The recitals of the endless affairs in which he indulges while waiting for his One True Love become, after a while, numbing and–eventually–distasteful. By the time he takes his final pre-Fermina lover, a school girl trusted to his guardianship, Florentino’s right to claim any kind of moral high ground for his enduring passion for the lost love of his youth is long gone. No Joycean “scrupulous meanness” here–the two men are painted in absolute, merciless detail, and boy, they don’t come across well. At which point, I have a hard time caring about the story.

My other problem was the laxness of the narrative. I love Garcia Marquez’s audacity when it comes to narrative. In Nobody Talks to the Colonel, he writes from the point of view of an entire Caribbean nation, shifting in mid-sentence from a prostitute to a bishop to a group of school children. In the amazing Chronicle of a Death Foretold, he tells you what happened in the first few pages and then spends the rest of the book dissecting the cause. In Love in a Time of Cholera, he utilizes the same quasi-journalistic approach over and over–telling us what happened and then telling us at great length how or why it happened. After a while, I found myself wanting him just to get on with it. Also, threads drop. The opening sequence involves the aged Dr. Urbino attending to the body of a friend who has committed suicide. At the friend’s house, he discovers a letter addressed to him that contains news that shakes him to the core; it is this sense of disquiet that leads, we are given to understand, to his falling accidentally to his death. What was in the letter? We never find out. It’s never mentioned again. It doesn’t feel like a literary evocation of the unknowable. It feels like a lazy cheat.

I think I’m going back to reading young adult fantasies.

Leave a Reply — Please!

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.