TRP's review of Garcia Marquez

[Page]

Dave,

You are a most helpful fellow. You have my undying gratitude. Until I die, I 
suppose.

Thanks

Page


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: "rich" <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
Cc: "Page" <page at quesnelbc.com>; "Mark Kohut" <markekohut at yahoo.com>; 
"pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>; "Brad Andrews" 
<braden.andrews at gmail.com>; "mark levine" <leevyne at aol.com>; "me" 
<mark.kohut at gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 1:46 PM
Subject: Re: TRP's review of Garcia Marquez


> 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
>


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