The Heart's Eternal Vow

Wed Feb 14 13:16:50 CST 2007

tara--

you're not related to mike and carol brady are you?
sorry, couldn't help it

rich

On 2/14/07, Tara Brady <madame.brady at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> What I've always loved best about this is the word Garcimarquesian.
>
> Gorgeous, isn't it?
>
> On 14/02/07, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> > THE HEART'S ETERNAL VOW
> > April 10, 1988
> > By Thomas Pynchon
> > LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by
> > Edith Grossman. 348 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.
> >
> >
> > LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA By Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated by
> > Edith Grossman. 348 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95.
> >
> > LOVE, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love
> > is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point
> > mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there
> > we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a
> > game of eternity. It's about then that we may begin to regard love
> > songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age
> > pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly
> > impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.
> >
> > At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic
> > infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent,
> > premortal hope? Pretty far out on life's limb, at least. Suppose,
> > then, it were possible, not only to swear love ''forever,'' but
> > actually to follow through on it - to live a long, full and authentic
> > life based on such a vow, to put one's alloted stake of precious time
> > where one's heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel
> > Garcia Marquez's new novel ''Love in the Time of Cholera,'' one on
> > which he delivers, and triumphantly.
> >
> > In the postromantic ebb of the 70's and 80's, with everybody now so
> > wised up and even growing paranoid about love, once the magical
> > buzzword of a generation, it is a daring step for any writer to decide
> > to work in love's vernacular, to take it, with all its folly,
> > imprecision and lapses in taste, at all seriously -that is, as well
> > worth those higher forms of play that we value in fiction. For Garcia
> > Marquez the step may also be revolutionary. ''I think that a novel
> > about love is as valid as any other,'' he once remarked in a
> > conversation with his friend, the journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza
> > (published as ''El Olor de la Guayaba,'' 1982). ''In reality the duty
> > of a writer - the revolutionary duty, if you like - is that of writing
> > well.''
> >
> > And - oh boy - does he write well. He writes with impassioned control,
> > out of a maniacal serenity: the Garcimarquesian voice we have come to
> > recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new
> > resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical
> > and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and
> > cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar, as in
> > this description of a turn-of-the-century balloon trip:
> >
> > ''From the sky they could see, just as God saw them, the ruins of the
> > very old and heroic city of Cartagena de Indias, the most beautiful in
> > the world, abandoned by its inhabitants because of the sieges of the
> > English and the atrocities of the buccaneers. They saw the walls,
> > still intact, the brambles in the streets, the fortifications devoured
> > by heartsease, the marble palaces and the golden altars and the
> > viceroys rotting with plague inside their armor.
> >
> > ''They flew over the lake dwellings of the Trojas in Cataca, painted
> > in lunatic colors, with pens holding iguanas raised for food and
> > balsam apples and crepe myrtle hanging in the lacustrian gardens.
> > Excited by everyone's shouting, hundreds of naked children plunged
> > into the water, jumping out of windows, jumping from the roofs of the
> > houses and from the canoes that they handled with astonishing skill,
> > and diving like shad to recover the bundles of clothing, the bottles
> > of cough syrup, the beneficent food that the beautiful lady with the
> > feathered hat threw to them from the basket of the balloon.''
> >
> > This novel is also revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of
> > love made under a presumption of immortality - youthful idiocy, to
> > some -may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to know
> > better, in the face of the undeniable. This is, effectively, to assert
> > the resurrection of the body, today as throughout history an
> > unavoidably revolutionary idea. Through the ever-subversive medium of
> > fiction, Garcia Marquez shows us how it could all plausibly come
> > about, even - wild hope -for somebody out here, outside a book, even
> > as inevitably beaten at, bought and resold as we all must have become
> > if only through years of simple residence in the injuring and
> > corruptive world.
> >
> > HERE'S what happens. The story takes place between about 1880 and
> > 1930, in a Caribbean seaport city, unnamed but said to be a composite
> > of Cartagena and Barranquilla - as well, perhaps, as cities of the
> > spirit less officially mapped. Three major characters form a triangle
> > whose hypotenuse is Florentino Ariza, a poet dedicated to love both
> > carnal and transcendent, though his secular fate is with the River
> > Company of the Caribbean and its small fleet of paddle-wheel
> > steamboats. As a young apprentice telegrapher he meets and falls
> > forever in love with Fermina Daza, a ''beautiful adolescent with . . .
> > almond-shaped eyes,'' who walks with a ''natural haughtiness . . . her
> > doe's gait making her seem immune to gravity.'' Though they exchange
> > hardly a hundred words face to face, they carry on a passionate and
> > secret affair entirely by way of letters and telegrams, even after the
> > girl's father has found out and taken her away on an extended
> > ''journey of forgetting.'' But when she returns, Fermina rejects the
> > lovesick young man after all, and eventually meets and marries instead
> > Dr. Juvenal Urbino who, like the hero of a 19th-century novel, is well
> > born, a sharp dresser, somewhat stuck on himself but a terrific catch
> > nonetheless.
> >
> > For Florentino, love's creature, this is an agonizing setback, though
> > nothing fatal. Having sworn to love Fermina Daza forever, he settles
> > in to wait for as long as he has to until she's free again. This turns
> > out to be 51 years, 9 months and 4 days later, when suddenly,
> > absurdly, on a Pentecost Sunday around 1930, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies,
> > chasing a parrot up a mango tree. After the funeral, when everyone
> > else has left, Florentino steps forward with his hat over his heart.
> > ''Fermina,'' he declares, ''I have waited for this opportunity for
> > more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of
> > eternal fidelity and everlasting love.'' Shocked and furious, Fermina
> > orders him out of the house. ''And don't show your face again for the
> > years of life that are left to you. . . . I hope there are very few of
> > them.''
> >
> > The heart's eternal vow has run up against the world's finite terms.
> > The confrontation occurs near the end of the first chapter, which
> > recounts Dr. Urbino's last day on earth and Fermina's first night as a
> > widow. We then flash back 50 years, into the time of cholera. The
> > middle chapters follow the lives of the three characters through the
> > years of the Urbinos' marriage and Florentino Ariza's rise at the
> > River Company, as one century ticks over into the next. The last
> > chapter takes up again where the first left off, with Florentino, now,
> > in the face of what many men would consider major rejection,
> > resolutely setting about courting Fermina Daza all over again, doing
> > what he must to win her love.
> >
> > IN their city, throughout a turbulent half-century, death has
> > proliferated everywhere, both as el colera, the fatal disease that
> > sweeps through in terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la colera,
> > defined as choler or anger, which taken to its extreme becomes
> > warfare. Victims of one, in this book, are more than once mistaken for
> > victims of the other. War, ''always the same war,'' is presented here
> > not as the continuation by other means of any politics that can
> > possibly matter, but as a negative force, a plague, whose only meaning
> > is death on a massive scale. Against this dark ground, lives, so
> > precarious, are often more and less conscious projects of resistance,
> > even of sworn opposition, to death. Dr. Urbino, like his father before
> > him, becomes a leader in the battle against the cholera, promoting
> > public health measures obsessively, heroically. Fermina, more
> > conventionally but with as much courage, soldiers on in her chosen
> > role of wife, mother and household manager, maintaining a safe
> > perimeter for her family. Florentino embraces Eros, death's well-known
> > long-time enemy, setting off on a career of seductions that eventually
> > add up to 622 ''long-term liaisons, apart from . . . countless
> > fleeting adventures,'' while maintaining, impervious to time, his
> > deeper fidelity, his unquenchable hope for a life with Fermina. At the
> > end he can tell her truthfully - though she doesn't believe it for a
> > minute - that he has remained a virgin for her.
> >
> > So far as this is Florentino's story, in a way his Bildungsroman, we
> > find ourselves, as he earns the suspension of our disbelief, cheering
> > him on, wishing for the success of this stubborn warrior against age
> > and death, and in the name of love. But like the best fictional
> > characters, he insists on his autonomy, refusing to be anything less
> > ambiguous than human. We must take him as he is, pursuing his tomcat
> > destiny out among the streets and lovers' refuges of this city with
> > which he lives on terms of such easy intimacy, carrying with him a
> > potential for disasters from which he remains safe, immunized by a
> > comical but dangerous indifference to consequences that often borders
> > on criminal neglect. The widow Nazaret, one of many widows he is fated
> > to make happy, seduces him during a night-long bombardment from the
> > cannons of an attacking army outside the city. Ausencia Santander's
> > exquisitely furnished home is burgled of every movable item while she
> > and Florentino are frolicking in bed. A girl he picks up at Carnival
> > time turns out to be a homicidal machete-wielding escapee from the
> > local asylum. Olimpia Zuleta's husband murders her when he sees a
> > vulgar endearment Florentino has been thoughtless enough to write on
> > her body in red paint. His lover's amorality causes not only
> > individual misfortune but ecological destruction as well: as he learns
> > by the end of the book, his River Company's insatiable appetite for
> > firewood to fuel its steamers has wiped out the great forests that
> > once bordered the Magdalena river system, leaving a wasteland where
> > nothing can live. ''With his mind clouded by his passion for Fermina
> > Daza he never took the trouble to think about it, and by the time he
> > realized the truth, there was nothing anyone could do except bring in
> > a new river.''
> >
> > IN fact, dumb luck has as much to do with getting Florentino through
> > as the intensity or purity of his dream. The author's great affection
> > for this character does not entirely overcome a sly concurrent
> > subversion of the ethic of machismo, of which Garcia Marquez is not
> > especially fond, having described it elsewhere simply as usurpation of
> > the rights of others. Indeed, as we've come to expect from his
> > fiction, it's the women in this story who are stronger, more attuned
> > to reality. When Florentino goes crazy with live, developing symptoms
> > like those of cholera, it is his mother, Transito Ariza, who pulls him
> > out of it. His innumerable lecheries are rewarded not so much for any
> > traditional masculine selling points as for his obvious and aching
> > need to be loved. Women go for it. ''He is ugly and sad,'' Fermina
> > Daza's cousin Hildebranda tells her, ''but he is all love.''
> >
> > And Garcia Marquez, straight-faced teller of tall tales, is his
> > biographer. At the age of 19, as he has reported, the young writer
> > underwent a literary epiphany on reading the famous opening lines of
> > Kafka's ''Metamorphosis,'' in which a man wakes to find himself
> > transformed into a giant insect. ''Gosh,'' exclaimed Garcia Marquez,
> > using in Spanish a word we in English may not, ''that's just the way
> > my grandmother used to talk!'' And that, he adds, is when novels began
> > to interest him. Much of what come in his work to be called ''magic
> > realism'' was, as he tells it, simply the presence of that
> > grandmotherly voice.
> >
> > Nevertheless, in this novel we have come a meaningful distance from
> > Macondo, the magical village in ''One Hundred Years of Solitude''
> > where folks routinely sail through the air and the dead remain in
> > everyday conversation with the living: we have descended, perhaps in
> > some way down the same river, all the way downstream, into war and
> > pestilence and urban confusions to the edge of a Caribbean haunted
> > less by individual dead than by a history which has brought so
> > appallingly many down, without ever having spoken, or having spoken
> > gone unheard, or having been heard, left unrecorded. As revolutionary
> > as writing well is the duty to redeem these silences, a duty Garcia
> > Marquez has here fulfilled with honor and compassion. It would be
> > presumptuous to speak of moving ''beyond'' ''One Hundred Years of
> > Solitude'' but clearly Garcia Marquez has moved somewhere else, not
> > least into deeper awareness of the ways in which, as Florentino comes
> > to learn, ''nobody teaches life anything.'' There are still delightful
> > and stunning moments contrary to fact, still told with the same
> > unblinking humor - presences at the foot of the bed, an anonymously
> > delivered doll with a curse on it, the sinister parrot, almost a minor
> > character, whose pursuit ends with the death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino.
> > But the predominant claim on the author's attention and energies comes
> > from what is not so contrary to fact, a human consensus about
> > ''reality'' in which love and the possibility of love's extinction are
> > the indispensable driving forces, and varieties of magic have become,
> > if not quite peripheral, then at least more thoughtfully deployed in
> > the service of an expanded vision, matured, darker than before but no
> > less clement.
> >
> > It could be argued that this is the only honest way to write about
> > love, that without the darkness and the finitude there might be
> > romance, erotica, social comedy, soap opera - all genres, by the way,
> > that are well represented in this novel - but not the Big L. What that
> > seems to require, along with a certain vantage point, a certain level
> > of understanding, is an author's ability to control his own love for
> > his characters, to withhold from the reader the full extent of his
> > caring, in other words not to lapse into drivel.
> >
> > In translating ''Love in the Time of Cholera,'' Edith Grossman has
> > been attentive to this element of discipline, among many nuances of
> > the author's voice to which she is sensitively, imaginatively attuned.
> > My Spanish isn't perfect, but I can tell that she catches admirably
> > and without apparent labor the swing and translucency of his writing,
> > its slang and its classicism, the lyrical stretches and those
> > end-of-sentence zingers he likes to hit us with. It is a faithful and
> > beautiful piece of work.
> >
> > THERE comes a moment, early in his career at the River Company of the
> > Caribbean when Florentino Ariza, unable to write even a simple
> > commercial letter without some kind of romantic poetry creeping in, is
> > discussing the problem with his uncle Leo XII, who owns the company.
> > It's no use, the young man protests -''Love is the only thing that
> > interests me.''
> >
> > ''The trouble,'' his uncle replies, ''is that without river
> > navigation, there is no love.'' For Florentino this happens to be
> > literally true: the shape of his life is defined by two momentous
> > river voyages, half a century apart. On the first he made his decision
> > to return and live forever in the city of Fermina Daza, to persevere
> > in his love for as long as it might take. On the second, through a
> > desolate landscape, he journeys into love and against time, with
> > Fermina, at last, by his side. There is nothing I have read quite like
> > this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and
> > tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a
> > lifetime's experience steering us unerringly among hazards of
> > skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose
> > navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to
> > return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance -at the
> > very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to
> > us, among which most certainly belongs ''Love in the Time of
> > Cholera,'' this shining and heartbreaking novel.
> >
> > http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-cholera.html
> >
> > http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_cholera.html
> >
> > http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/uncollected/cholera.html
> >
> > http://www.vheissu.info/bio/eng_marquez.htm
> >
> > Garcia Marquez, Gabriel.  Love in the Time of Cholera.
> >     Trans. Edith Grossman.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.
> >
> >
> http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400034680
> >
> >
> http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400034680&view=rg
> >
> >
> http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400034680&view=excerpt
> >
> > Love in the Time of Cholera (2007)
> >
> > http://imdb.com/title/tt0484740/
> >
>
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