Love in the Time of Cholera:
Beverly, Elizabeth A
BOOKS The distance between bodies I am tempted to proclaim that no one else writes like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but what I mean more precisely is that no one else has invited me to read the way he...
...Not at all...
...We feel unsettled...
...It unsettles him...
...He knows the power of the right word at the right time...
...And that, surely, is Garcia Marquez's absolute knowledge...
...Elizabeth A. Beverly is written, or to find out just what happens to the elderly Florentino and Fermi-na, the point is that we read...
...For just as Florentino knows that in order for love to exist it must be proclaimed and heard, so does Garcia Mdrquez know that the only way for Love in the Time of Cholera to exist is for us to read it...
...For although this author can never be accused of being didactic, he does want to teach us...
...People understand that to Garcia Marquez our literacy matters...
...I know I'm not alone in my pleasure...
...But lest we despair, Garcia Marquez knows one way to bridge the distance between bodies, one way to meet...
...Here we encounter two massive Western abstractions undercut by disease, and a disease which sounds a lot like a human emotion...
...This revelation comes from the friend's own hand, and for the rest of the day, this revelation spreads through our man's life...
...BOOKS The distance between bodies I am tempted to proclaim that no one else writes like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but what I mean more precisely is that no one else has invited me to read the way he has...
...The lesson lies not only in what the book says (that love through time may actually exist) or how it says (with technical virtuosity, humor, and pathos), but that it says at all...
...I am reminded of Charlotte Bronte who, through Jane Eyre's voice, calls to us through the years: "Reader, I married him...
...Their lives are no more privileged than those of other people who haunt the prose of this book: Rosalba who carries her baby in a birdcage...
...Hundreds of letters exchange hands, missives are slipped under doors, telegraph wires hum, even a telephone is installed...
...Leona Cassiani, the "lionlady" of Florentine's soul...
...For if One Hundred Years of Solitude is in some way about the fictional village of Macondo, and The Autumn of the Patriarch (1976) about the illusory potency of a Caribbean dictator (to cite only two of his previous fictions), then these novels are equally about the delight of finding within myself the ability to read with generosity, compassion, and no small degree of surprise...
...Bodies trap us in time, in disease and, if not in love itself, then at least in our need for love...
...Great Russian novels come to mind...
...Garcia Marquez's generous embrace of these lives encourages us to recognize the rich riot of our own lives...
...For Fermina, letters are things to be stashed away, hidden, folded, even burned...
...This suggests that people want not only to read about a kind of love which both defies and redeems time, anger, and contagion, but to spend time reading about it...
...There is humor in this title...
...Whether we read to find out how remarkably well the book LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Edith Grossman Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95, 348 pp...
...The elderly Fermina reads one of Florentine's letters: "It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.'' Perhaps we are like Fermina in our need for such a meditation, our hope that this novel may be it...
...The second section suggests that we start over...
...And if Garcia Marquez's narrative dazzle and our curiosity get us to read in the first place, then we'll learn something...
...They are able to learn at all because of their patience...
...Garcia MaYquez requires the same act...
...Fermina, the recipient, learns to read more generously...
...I suspect that that is the reason he writes like no one else...
...This novel is about the desperate attempt to communicate...
...And so he falls...
...Then, astonishingly, we find out that this novel isn't what it seems to be at all...
...Whether enticing or agonizing, the entrapment exists, and we may believe that there is no way out...
...If the narrative is not direct, if it requires our patience at times, this is primarily because Garcia Marquez reminds us continually that authorial whim is the only reason that the two main characters have been singled out to star in this novel...
...The loss of footing is a sure touch, because we can lose footing only if we have feet...
...we hear about love, about time and its passage, even about "the great cholera epidemic...
...If the book is good, and we hope it's good, we may learn how to dream our way into the next full-bodied day...
...Still, we are most like Fermina in our grasp of the object itself, not the ideas within...
...we lose our footing, and fall through time into the dense narrative of early love...
...This entrapment may be enticing, as in one man's' 'pleasure [in] smelling a secret garden in [his] urine . . . purified by lukewarm asparagus.'' Or the experience may be agonizing, as in the case of an earache so intense that the woman who suffers it "realized that her pain was stronger than her desire to be with him," the man she is growing to love...
...The lesson begins with the title...
...In this opening section we follow a man through a day...
...a "good" Chinese who wins the ' 'Golden Orchid award" in the annual Poetic Festival...
...This book is a big thing, and the sheer heft of it can comfort a body...
...I have risked revealing a glimpse of the plot because it seems important to assert that, in this section, Garcia Marquez is teaching us one way to read his novel...
...Edith Grossman's three-hundred-forty-eight page English translation of Love in the Time of Cholera, Garcia Marquez's most recent novel, has already logged several months on the New York Times' bestseller list...
...But in a way we are...
...She needed, still needs, for us to bear witness...
...Even a parrot...
...We are like his man, believing that we know certain facts about these kinds of big books, believing even that we are being invited to read the lives of one set of characters...
...In Love in the Time of Cholera, these devices do not dominate, but serve the bold, circling narrative...
...What passes for dialogue reads more like the significant aphorism set off by colons, for, over the course of time, only the powerful words are remembered...
...And, of course, it is the virtue of patience and the suffering of patients that allows us to recognize and accept love, time, and even cholera...
...And in this novel, as we follow the love of Florentino Ariza (telegraph clerk/ womanizer/riverboat magnate) for Fer-mina Daza (school girl/dutiful wife and mother/distinguished widow) through fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights in an unnamed Caribbean city, Garcia Marquez dazzles with wit and command...
...Fermina learns what longing really is...
...there is significance...
...He understands and writes about embodiment, not The Incarnation, but our incarnation, the simple fact that we play out our lives stranded inside of bodies...
...we must readjust...
...he cannot keep his footing, literally cannot keep his footing...
...As we begin reading we know we are in the right book...
...He asks us to attend to the matters raised by the title: love, age, disease/ death...
...It is both a tease and a stunner...
...Florentino learns that longing can never be satisfied, but it can be shared...
...They are things...
...Over the course of time, Florentino, the love-letter-writer, learns how to write better...
...He is elderly, fastidious...
...His stylistic flourishes: precise numbers, careful but random catalogues, extravagant ca-denced prose, slightly syrupy diction, phantasms glimmering in the margins (a perceptibly growing doll, a ghost waving from the shore), are all present...
...It seems merely accidental that we too cannot be included in this novel...
...I suspect that Garcia Marquez knows about our hope...
...He has had a friend, a man friend, and on this day, finds out that his friend is not the person he seemed to be...
...But how the title directly concerns the story we have little idea...
...When night comes, some of us flip on the light, nestle under the covers with a book, and begin to read...
Vol. 115 • July 1988 • No. 13
