ornate and ornamental
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.
