LiToC Day 8 probably

The twin themes of love and sewage are always present, as the title suggests - down to the smallest detail as when Fermina wishes she were able to empty a chamber pot over Dr Urbino when he serenades her with a grand piano. I'm still no further on with understanding the three perfumed crows (though the perfumed bit may be incidental - it's just that Urbino brushes past them and so takes on the smell of their "whorish perfume").  But then the whole thing fits the idea that everyone masks the smell of shit and death with anything they can . And even the author refers to the three crows in  a cage as the strangest thing.

Hildebrande is a welcome, very erotic diversion, as she bathes naked with Fermina each day, and flirts with Urbino in the carriage when they are rescued from the carriage. Of course it is a sharply observed psychological moment - the thought of another in Urbino's affections immediately stimulates Fermina to allow her father to allow Urbino to visit her.

Like the way somethings are just thrown in as when Lorenzo Daza knocks on his daughters door at night, drunk, and simply says "We're ruined".  No further explanation. Suspense!

Just read my first entry and realised that i'm getting into real momentum with this book , I like it after all.

LIYoC d-ay 7

There's something bothering me about the translation now - last night I read that the doctor fell for  'plebeian charms'. What's that all about? I won't work it out for certain until I the Spanish version of the book arrives.

I'm a third of the way through now, and it feels like it's been a fast propelled journey despite the richness and detail of the prose. Smells and exotica. There's always animals everywhere, either rotting corpses of of kind or another, or chained dogs in houses - the three crows in a cage. Perfumed crows as well. Picking up on that parrot theme. And I suppose you could look upon cholera as another kind of life from, just a little further down on the continuum of life, as far perhaps from the mules as the poor are from the rich in this society. And of course there is the perfect link in the waterworms - the mosquito larvae that inhabit their water supplies.

And why are the crows perfumed? Google doesn't help but gives some interesting leads - perfumes often associated with whores - women = crows??? seems a bit harsh.  There's another blog, a book group, that writes up its discussions. I loved this:
"Mary found this exoticism makes the book one to wallow in as it meanders through the story using evocative, rich description such as the honeymoon, boat trips and perfumed crows."
Hahahaha. 
They did like the book though: We thought that the book was beautifully written with interesting, quirky and well developed characters.

(http://www.chilternsreadinggroup.net/books.php)

LiToC Day 6

There are two short completely abrupt full stops in Fermina & Florentino's relationship, both taking place in a matter of a sentence or two (so I'm not talking about punctuation here, I'm talking about huge vast trains piling into immovable buffers).  The first is the last and it comes when Fermina turns Florentino away after Dr. Urbino's death ( it seems appropriate to refer to him more formally, why?) "Get out of here" she says, and adds a little more insult to injury by telling him she hopes he will die soon. And that's it. Although going back to the passage, I realise there is another page of description of her  grief, ending in the fact that she is thinking more about Florentino than her husband. But the dismissal is short and sweet, the reflection is what takes the page and a half. And it prefigures the first rejection  where after such an intense epistolary relationship he accosts her in the insalubrious market place and she rejects him out of hand.

" ...she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand.
         'No, please', she said. 'Forget it' "

And that's it, that's the moment of unfulfillment  Marquez pinpoints as surely as a pin through a butterfly's heart (do butterflies have hearts? - my insectology isn't up to much, but you get my drift) the exact end of the affair.  The rest is just one sided pleading, there is nothing left in her heart.

It's an incredibly economic and powerful technique. The reader has been swept along by the intensity of the affair, and the intensity of the two lover's separate lives from Fermina's saddle sore ulcers to Florentino's hopeless  search for treasure, broiling in a frock coat , hoodwinked by a twelve year old.  

LiToC Day 5

"so kind that no-one understood how he could be such a good manager", sprang out at me as one of those strange comments that I did not understand the context of - other than, of course, his supply of a room for Florentino. There is a caveat: ",at least it seemed so to Florentino", but it is not pursued further.  After this long in narrative time, short in pages courtship, the discovery of a letter, the expulsions of girl and aunt from school and home are almost matter of fact - now we think, now matters have come to a head.  I read this last part late last night, and am having to go back to it to remind me of what was happening, because there are little asides, glimpses into the future that you can forget if you don't read with attention. Like the woman who cleans up all the detritus ( a marvelous (is that the right word?) list in its own right) of the brothel, and begins to masturbate Florentino, who only stops her after she has undone the buttons of his trousers, but stops her nonetheless, despite allowing himself to feel the warmth of her hand upon his bare stomach. Another life, compressed into  few pages, and then, presumably forgotten for the rest of the book - or maybe not?

I'm contrasting all this, in some heady everyday mixture of images, thoughts and feelings with Breaking Bad and Lost in Austen, and then of course, gradually remembering Pride & Prejudice proper, that I will have to reread again, just so that I get all the references. 

And I've sent off a shortened version of the Travelogue of the Beautiful & the Damned, renamed the Travelogue of the  Damned & the Redeemed to Rattletales, have cut and cut to bring out a finished piece that still has its own internal pace and logic, but is under 2000 words.  I think it works. 

LiToC Day 4

An epistolary love affair, as tense as anything in Clarissa, approaches its culmination, with the white carnation.  It was a short read this morning, just a few sentences before a shower, and I have cross contamination from the world of online on demand series from Netflix.  Having watched Lost in Austen, as an antidote to the growing evil and tension in Breaking Bad, I can see that love and decorum are an unholy mix, as Amanda Price finds out, when the world she dreams of becomes more complicated and difficult than we thought. LiToC also has the savagery of the constant civil wars as a background, just as Breaking Bad has the wars and feuds between the cartels. Which is better, which is worth more? What are our concepts of worth, well,  worth.

LiToC - Day 3

Unexpected compressions of images, as  Florentino Ariza falls sick of his love for Fermina Daza and the symptoms are indistinguishable from  cholera, so love and death are crammed into a sentence - or maybe it wold be more accurate to say unrequited love, a more visceral image than the the death and the scent of bitter almonds that starts the book.

And I was surprised by Dr Juvenal Urbino's last declaration of love as he lay dying under the ladder. The incident with the soap, the undeclared battle that lasted for weeks until he finally returns to their marriage bed in the middle of the night in a half stupor, and the reconciliation is effected without either really giving way, seemed real, and convincing  but I had thought it was also a sign of a sham marriage, but I don't think it was now. So it makes me revise all the tenderness of her constant attention, dressing him when he can't dress, at his side in case he spills his food.

The fervent relationship carried on by letter is the more intense and yet liberating because it combines fulfillment with denial, so that we / they are dazzled always, never seeing the unveiling of the everyday that may inevitably disappoint.

On Reading Love in the Time of Cholera Day 2

Marquuez compresses the "love story"  of Dr. Urbino's marriage into a dense domestic package, that some includes the world outside, the animals, the town, the politics, rather like Dickens does in Little Dorrit, where the sumptuous feast laid out on the boat has food from every corner of the earth imprisoned on the field of the white table cloth.  Dr Urbino is fading in a sea of old age just as the celebration they attend is swamped by late rain and wind.

Then there is the chaos caused by the escaped parrot, where instead of the rains the high pressure hose of the fireman have ruins paintings and rugs. Decay and death are in the air, Dr Urbino, despite his appreciation of fine music, after all, must indulge his habits first, the little death of his siesta must happen before he attends the funeral, and his urine, already mentioned because of its lack of flow (in contrast to the surging floods around him) , smells of asparagus, a faintly disquieting and unpleasant image of an old man in his dotage.  The text flows on, round its intricate descriptions, and carries me along, just enough to keep me reading,  my attention is snagged by the overwhelming otherness of this luxury amid the hot sewage of a flooded town.

On reading Love in a Time of Cholera.

Day 1
I have started to read Love in Time of Cholera, another attempt to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and so far it's not looking so good. The slow paced narrative of the doctor who still rides in a carriage, the woman with the rose behind her ear, the parrot that is, in a manner of speaking, as that's where I have paused in my reading, still free at the top of the mango tree, none of them are enthralling me. The writing is detailed without being dense, and is permeated with death, just as the city he described is sodden with sewage in the rains, and choked with dust in the summer. I do not want to ponder these slow deaths in foreign climes, it's like reading Conrad, but in a bad translation. But I will read on, there is just enough to keep me going, and i have decided to record what goes on as I read, draw a map of where I am led, perhaps not in Borges sense of a map that covers the city, because i don't have the stamina to write word for word along side Marquez's long sentences, no this will be a topographical map in words like a cheap city guide that you might purchase from a machine in a tourist area, for a few coins. And just like those maps, that illustrate what the tourist board want you to see, so this will only tell what I want you to see, and it will be partial, biased, willful, moody, based on the feelings of the day.