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BOOKS I READ: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1985) translated by Edith Grossman (1988). Florentino Ariza, an idiosyncratic young man, falls in love with Fermina Daza, who despite her initial interest, ends up dismissing him with a disdainful, “poor man.” His unrequited love endures for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days, until the death of her husband, the esteemed Dr. Juvenal Urbino. In between, we learn of their lives, at times decadent, at times stunted, but always in search of love.
I decided to reread this book when I learned of the death of Edith Grossman a few weeks ago, whom I’ve admired from a far, having read a number of pieces by her and about her. In her obituary, there’s a great quote attributed to Garcia Marquez when he calls her to complain about how he’s heard she’s two-timing him with Cervantes, this after she started work on translating Don Quixote.
Rereading Garcia Marquez’s (second) classic decades after my initial reading, and at an age much close to the age of the protagonists at the end of the book, I nodded in agreement a number of times with Garcia Marquez’s astute observations on the toll of the passing years on one’s body and senses. The final boat trip, an escape from the realities of normal lives, where there are always the guardrails of responsibility and decorum, felt much more alluring.
The opening scene, at Jeremiah de Saint-Amour’s place, where Dr. Urbino has come to see about the suicide of his friend, was just as captivating as I had remembered it.
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