I have mixed feelings about the book I picked up in July (I think) and only finished yesterday. Yes, it took me the better part of four months to read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. I'm not a slow reader, but this was a slow book.

The story is not very complicated, but it is told in a meandering and elaborate fashion. The ornate qualities of the book made it difficult for me to be drawn in. Whenever the plot thickened, the author would digress into a prolonged and detailed description of previous, seemingly unrelated, events that introduced new, seemingly superfluous, characters. At these junctures, I felt the urge to skim until the main plot resumed. I wouldn't describe the book as a page turner, unless you were turning the pages to skip to where the plot resumes. 

But I didn't skim or skip any parts of the book due to the aesthetic quality of the prose, which was really the most enjoyable part of the book. The ornamental and rich nature of the writing made the novel deliciously poetic. I didn't want to miss out on any particularly satisfying passages embedded in the author's digressions from the main plot so I was reluctant to bypass any parts of the book. 

In particular, I loved García Márquez's examination of the concepts of memory and nostalgia throughout the novel. Here are some of the passages that stood out:

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Everything seemed smaller to him than when he left, poorer and sadder, and there were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the street that the carriage horses stumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house [...] he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia. Defeated, he turned his head away so that his mother would not see, and he began to cry in silence.

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However, when she thought he was completely erased from her memory, he reappeared where she least expected him, a phantom of her nostalgia. [...] While more recent events blurred in just a few days, the memories of her legendary journey [...] were as sharp as if they had happened yesterday, and they had the perverse clarity of nostalgia.

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[...] he realized that the Magdelena, father of waters, one of the great rivers of the world, was only an illusion of memory [...] [F]ifty years of uncontrolled deforestation had destroyed the river [...] the hunters fir skins from tanneries in New Orleans had exterminated the alligators that, with yawning mouths, had played dead for hours on end in the gullies along the shore as the lay in wait for butterflies, the parrots with their shrieking and the monkeys with their lunatic screams has died out as the foliage was destroyed, the manatees with their great breasts that has nursed their young and wept on the banks in a forlorn woman's voice were an extinct species, annihilated by the armored bullets of hunters for sport.

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Seeing as the novel was translated from Spanish, I wonder how true the translation is to the original words of García Márquez. Regardless of the authenticity of the words, there were certain phrases or passages, such as those above, that I found myself stopping to re-read. Probably another reason why it took me so long to finish the book.

Unpacking, the best part about moving (as per my tweet, it's like a birthday where you know in advance what you're getting and everything is slightly used), has been my main focus since we arrived on Thursday. Needless to say, I haven't begun exploring my new neighbourhood and city beyond the nearest coffee shop, fish taco restaurant, and grocery store. That's the next part of the adventure.

On Saturday night, Krista organized a house party for Kevin and I to celebrate our marriage and as a send-off for our imminent move to San Francisco. We had a great time catching up with our friends from Vancouver and Victoria and stayed out late. Needless to say, waking up the next morning to the prospect of packing was a struggle. 

The Swine Flu vaccine arrived this week. You might have heard. The media jumped all over it, treating it like an airlift of warm blankets and hot food to flood-ravaged lowlands in Manitoba. On Thursday, virtually every CBC newscast led with the vaccine story "How To Get It, where to get it, when to get it, who should get it, how often to get it. By the end of the day, the coverage made me want to run screaming to the nearest flu clinic to beg on hands and knees for the needle for me and mine. I kept waiting for reports of refrigerated flu transports being attacked on expressways by terror stricken parents desperate for the precious vials.

 

We are in the grip of a pandemic, all right, but it's not flu it's fear. For weeks, months even, we have been force fed by government and health agencies in print and the electronic media that things, Swine-wise, are going to get very, very bad this winter. Some months ago, a panel of distinguished American scientists warned that the so-called Second Wave could cause between 30,000 and 90,000 deaths by mid-October. In other words, now. This was duly reported as a quote plausible scenario. Close Quote. Canadians have been warned that the Swine Flu numbers could be in the tens of thousands. But with the Niagara of conflicting information, the o-again, off-again impending threat, it is difficult for most of us to know what to believe.

 

For example a television host on a US channel said the Swine Flu virus was and I'm quoting "something we have never seen before in history". He made it sound like some creepy, deadly strain for the planet Zerxes. When in fact H1N1 has been around and mutating since the mid-Seventies. Then there are the numbers. In June, in the US, about 11 weeks into the pandemic, there were 144 deaths. After six months, Swine Flu has killed about as many people as seasonal flu does in six days. In other words, the Swine is less a danger than regular seasonal flu.

 

Next we were told, that the coming winter was when things would get really, really bad. Winter is just ending in Australian and everybody was wondering how Australians managed the Swine; CBC sent a reporter down under. Turns out, the Aussies survived pretty well. Dr. Brian Goldman hosts the ever excellent CBC Radio show White Coat, Black Art. Last month he hosted a gutsy episode called Swinefeld a flu about nothing. He did the math and pointed out that in Australia there were slightly under 200 deaths from Swine Flu in a country of 22-million. By the way, Goldman thinks that refusing to shake hands or bumping elbows, all that protective nonsense, is about as helpful as hiding under a desk during nuclear attack.

 

I'm more than a little skeptical about Swine Flu predictions of doom. And for a very good reason. In 1976, I wrote a 3,000 word magazine piece for Maclean's suggesting that that year's H1N1 outbreak could equal the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. Not a career highlight. The virus never got out of the Fort Dixx compound in New Jersey. About 240 soldiers were infected. But about 500 Americans who were vaccinated came down with a disease called Guillain-Barre Syndrome and 25 of them died.

 

Journalists who make predictions about impending heath perils or pass on such predictions have to take great care. Remember what we told you about Y2K; airplanes falling from the skies, elevators crashing to earth? Remember what we told you about the Great Bird Flu pandemic of 2005 and all those deaths hat never happened? Sadly there's no vaccine against panic.

Amelia Curran's song Bye Bye Montreal seems fitting right about now. I'll be back for Christmas, so "à bientôt" is probably more appropriate than "bye bye". In any case, leaving this great city is never easy.

I wonder what the price of gas would be in the US if the government didn't subsidize fossil fuels... see here for more.

autumnal [\ȯ-ˈtəm-nəl\] adj

     

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As many readers of this blog know, I'm not a big meat eater. When I do eat meat, I tend towards organic/small farm options. However, there are rare exceptions. One of those exceptions is barbecued chicken. And not any barbecued chicken, only Châlet Bar-B-Q rotisserie chicken.

Last month, we were at a friend's wedding. After the ceremony and before the reception, the bride's brother hosted a casual garden party. Sitting around in the yard and chatting with friends from school, the topic of toe socks somehow came up. 

I'm bracing myself for major change. Tomorrow is my last day of work and then I'm off for the next 365 days. I have no plans beyond moving to San Francisco. The world is my oyster. I'm hoping that I don't develop an allergy to shellfish.