TRP's review of Garcia Marquez

[Dave Monroe]

On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:27 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Pynchon reviewed Love in the Time of Cholera for the NYTBR--you can
> read it on NYT's website--book reviews are free.
>
> Rich
>
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 3:16 PM, Page <page at quesnelbc.com> wrote:
>> Mark,
>>
>> Can you steer me to TRP's review of Marquez? (I assume you are referring to
>> Garcia Marquez.) Was it a largely about *100 Years of Solitude*, or was it
>> not focused on any particular novel or short story (ies)?

THE HEART'S ETERNAL VOW
Date: April 10, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page
1, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By Thomas Pynchon; Thomas Pynchon, author of ''Gravity's
Rainbow,'' has been working on another novel.
Lead: LEAD: LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA By Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Translated by Edith Grossman. 348 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
$18.95.
Text:

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