Love in the Time of Cholera

[August 2009]

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Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

number of voters: 2
percentage of voters who finished the book: 100
highest rating: 5
lowest rating: 5
average rating: 5

question of the night: Can really good writing redeem a really long story with really unlikable characters?

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She pulls the faded book from the shelf, dusting its cover with the palm of her frail hand. The pages are worn and yellowed, corners threading from years of folding and unfolding where the reader had marked his place. As she opens the cover, a musty smell fills her nostrils, and she breathes deep its familiar scent.

This is the book. This is the book that her lover read and reread from the time she first knew him until the day it fell from his hands in his final repose.

She’d never dared to open it since that day. How it came to be on this shelf, she would never learn, but there it was, and without pausing to contemplate the repercussions of the ensuing memories, she had removed it from its own repose.

It is just a book, she tells herself. Just a story. There is nothing to fear from a story, a jumble of words arranged in a particular order. But her hands tremble nonetheless. And her fingers fumble with the frontispiece as she turns to chapter one.

...

As if from a dream she awakens to the final sentence, five words loaded with a subtext that sends her heart plummeting. This is the book. This is the book that her lover, to whom she had abandoned herself and her purity for innumerable years, had so desperately adored. Her stomach roiled.

Who was this man who had loved a book with such unlikable—nay, appalling—characters and such a tedious plot. Had he seen himself in this same light? Had he thought of her in this way?

The writing was beautiful; perhaps he merely enjoyed the language the author employed. Perhaps he felt a particular sympathy for these drifting souls. Or maybe, through some literary trick of the mind, he was drawn to the disease of the title, somehow knowing that he too would die by its clawed grasp.

This was the book he had loved as much as, if not more than, he had loved her. A better woman might return it to its resting place on the shelf for others to find, read, ponder.

She throws it in the fire and watches it burn.