What follows is a transcript of what went through my mind as I labored through the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. Think of this as a review of the book and be forewarned as it will ruin your experience of the story if you have not read it yet:
Yes, so he loves her.
She loves him.
She rejects him.
Meaningless events in his life.
Meaningless events in her life.
Some more events.
His sexual escapades.
Her mundane life embellished with travels.
Blah Blah Blah.
More events.
When will this story ever end?
A ton of GRE words here, good practice. Love Barron’s list.
They both age.
He still loves her.
He consoles her after husband’s death.
They’re old but still “active.”
They hook up on a boat.
The end.
Suffice to say that I did not enjoy the novel. I found the style to be tedious and onerous, and the plot to be an inflated repetition of an overrated romantic notion. What compelled me to read Márquez in the first place was the recent popular fascination with him, which I bluntly found to be uncalled for.
You may enjoy the Guardian’s “Digested Reads” which do existentially the same with other books.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/series/digestedread
I meant “essentially”.
I saw the movie, and I felt the same as you did!
and recently I was struggling with Márquez’s memoirs Living to to Tell the Tale, the thing I hate the most is buying a book I would be more than willing to start consuming instantly only to get discouraged and find myself crawling slowly from one line to the next.
The book still lies on night stand :(
Well now we will disagree a little bit. The movie is a flop, no question about that as it reflects very shallow dialogue and expressions of feelings. I read the novel in Arabic and I loved it. Remember that Marquez writes in Spanish and his “English” novels are also translated. It seems the Arabic translation I read was highly professional since I really liked the romance component and the long lasting passion included. Marquez has a style of linking reality with fiction and sometimes mythology of rural latin America. Try reading one novel in Arabic (let it be 100 years of solitude) and you may find it interesting. The fascination for Maquez is long sustained and not recent.
As for the memoires I also read them in Arabic and the book took 3 days from me to finish. Just like Heba, it is still on my wife’s bedside table since 2 months! So, it can be a gender issue at the end
Haha Batir. I like the stab you took at “gender issues” in your comment. That was smooth.
The translation was excellent as far as I could tell (of course since I can’t read Spanish and have not read the Spanish original I can’t be certain), it was the story itself that bored the hell out of me.
I don’t think I will touch a Marquez piece again for a long, long time, if ever.
i liked the novel .it was just real ! i got bored at times but over all it wasn’t bad.
i heard some bad reviews about the movie tho.
OMG Tololy this book was torture when I read it part of the bloggers book club. TORTURE and I read anything.
It might be good in Spanish though since it was a translation. D
I would never walk out of a movie in the middle no matter how bad, but I have no problems putting down a bad book no matter what. I guess the difference is you actively work to read the book whereas with a movie you just sit there and take it
Yes, Love In the Time of Cholera is a snooze, and the movie a poor attempt at infusing something like the stereotypical “Latin passion” into an American movie. Please don’t give up on Marquez, by the way–One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold are quite excellent. And by the way, I’m not an expert on Spanish-English translation, but I’ve read some of his works in Spanish and others in English and I thought the English translations were very good representations of the original works–so if some of the books are boring, I don’t think translation is necessarily the problem.