Day 14 - so two weeks to read this book already and only on page 211. The story now alternates between picaresque adventures with Florento's widows and Fermina's unpicaresque non-adventures with Urbino. We learn that Fermina pitied Florentino, that she didn't get on with her stiff in-laws, that she didn't get on with her husband after their honeymoon. I'm adrift in this narrative, going from small island to small island, a tiny tussock of words bunched in the thin earth like half-dead sea grass. Or something like that. I'm reading slowly, because I've decided not to speed read through to the end but to give the book proper attention. But I don't care about the characters, and I don't care for the baroque descriptions and vignettes of social life that keep the island hopping story going.
As Fermina, the author tells us, realises, the world is composed of:
"...atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words with which people entertained each other in society so as not to commit murder"
Quite.
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