LiToC day 11

Not much read today, but what little there was significant. Dr. Urbino's serious, and in a lot of ways admirable care, then seduction of his wife, not until three days after their actual marriage (her sea sickness intervened), is detailed in obliquely erotic language.  It's not porn it's fucking literature, I think - but then back  in the time, 1985, remember that nigh on thirty years ago, porn was still limited to top shelf magazines and VHS videos bought from the Friday-Ad, or seedy licenced sex shops. It wasn't mainstream, accepted, part of everyday life, so this was, even for this fairly recent time, thirty years ago, perhaps more explicit, especially in a Spanish culture fucked by Catholicism.  So, for its day it is a master piece of dissembled explicitness.  So it was mildly erotic to read, and of course, in literary terms in the novel it contrasts with the wild abandon of Florentino in his fling with Widow Nazeret, who feels like some kind of character from a sleazy Italian opera. (Why Italian, I don't know, it just sprang to mind).

So I'm  in a state of mild interest in what happens next, and mild discontent, because I might have to read through more sentences of padding , like the Captain of the boats woodwind concert as they sailed into the port of Caracoli.  It just feels like a tourist guide book insert. 

I'm sort of disenchanted with the book now, though it has great insights into the parallels between love and cholera ( I say blithely - what are they then?).  Well incontinence and a low recovery rate I suppose. I feel I am being literatured at, in a way that I don't feel when I read Dostoyevsky, who just tells the fucking story and makes his characters do the lecturing.