Nabakov's Lolita Day 5

We're now in the runaway stage, HH has Dolores in his clutches, and through a mixture of threats and bribery, he is just managing to keep her on board. There's a lot of dark humour in what is a case of child kidnap, there's a balance of coercion over which HH is not going to step - he uses all the power of his adulthood, but Dolores is still a moody ordinary child.  The only picture you get of her is through the distorted lense of HH's completely self -obsessed vision.
The pastiche of all the attraction of the travel round 50's USA is part of Nabakov's joking around. Set off against this banal set of "Pine Lodges" , and ersatz log cabins built to mimic Lincoln's childhood home, his crimes seem more sinister, more worm like and insidious.

Nabakov's Lolita day 4

The Kindle obligingly says I am 38% way though the book now, the concept of page numbers not quite so reliable in this ear of digitally resized text. Although, should I wish to find that information is obligingly supplied by the Kindle app on my PC - page 122 of 352.

HH, in his fantasy - I'm pretty sure it is just his fantasy, has had his newly married wife run over by a car (OK it is a spoiler, but as Nabakov says, somewhere, if you're reading his novels just to know what comes next, you're not reading it right), and has taken Dolores off, and left her drugged in their hotel room, while he ruminates on his planned ravishment and rape of her. Let's make no bones about it, this is child rape he is planning.  So back to that question that keeps running through my mind -is this book justifiable (going beyond it seems to always make the top 100 books of the world in most surveys of that kind)?  Of course it's beautifully written and constructed. And it also tackles the issues of sexual desire, forbidden fruit, adult responsibility, what is legal and what is not.  Just as HH fades between outright fantasy and supposed justification (after all he says 12 year olds were fair game in other cultures at other times).  I think what Nabakov manages to do is suggest all these intertwined themes, to describe and delight in sexuality as pure sensuality, but still to keep us aware that HH is a thoroughly unpleasant and evil man who has put his gratifications at the centre of his solipsistic world. So there's your central moral standpoint - loud and clear. With that said, says this novel, we still have a world of desire, fantasy, in adults and in children, which we are all uncomfortable with and possessed by in equal measure.  Put simply, the sex and sexuality exists, it is fine, the abuse of power and influence exists, and that is what is most definitely not fine.

Nabakov's Lolita day 3

Racing on through, I've read the famous passage again, (which incidentally, most articles complaining about the sheer depravity of Lolita, reprint in full), where he manages to orgasm in his pajamas from the frottage of her sitting on his lap.  It's all a bit yukky and erotic at the same time - as I think Nabakov intended, everything is going on inside HH's head, and the reader is being taken for the ride.

I just put "why did Nabakov write Lolita?" into Google ( which, completely off the point, said "Do you mean: "why did Nabakov wrote Lolita?" sic.

In a demolition of a self published book, Solving Nabakov's Lolita Riddle  that says the key to Nabakov's Lolita is the fact that he was sexually abused by his uncle, the reviewer cites this quote from Nabakov:

"It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I’ve no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions. (SO 16)"

That fits with the chess problem comment I picked up from Wikipedia (see last blog post).  And kind of gets me nowhere, reduced to the colloquial, the unknowing. 

Another answer suggests (wonderfully) that Nabakov just liked writing, and was stimulated (perhaps the wrong word, perhaps the right word in this context) by Edgar Allan Poe's poem Annabel Lee.  Well both seem right, the second seems useful.

The New York Times obituary is good on Nabakov in general.

I'm not the only one to wonder why he wrote it. This compendium of reactions just about covers the whole lot from "wonderful" to "sicko paedo", with some intelligent comments inbetween.

Nabakov's Lolita day 2

It's an easy read most of the way,  if sometimes an uncomfortable one, but continually there are odd, very rare words, bits of French, lots of digs at psychiatry and psychoanalysis, pastiche .  As someone said in one of the reviews, he's written a pornographic novel without ever writing pornographically.  

We're never given any doubt that HH is a thoroughly nasty character, vis this bit of his thinking when his wife Valechka has told him she is leaving him 


"She had very vulnerable legs, and I decided I would limit myself to hurting her very horribly as soon as we were alone."

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (Kindle Locations 457-458). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 

Like so much of his life this is an empty imagining, but we're given a clear indication that he might be capable of carrying through with it. 

I'm intrigued by what Nabakov made of this novel (after all he wrote it) - and the Google trail seems to suggest that he had a great affection for it.  he certainly wanted to publish it when he had written it. Most publishers of the day rejected it, so he was eventually published in France by an outfit that mainly published pornographic novels.

Of course there are as many justifications as condemnations in the reactions to the book: I am most in tune with Martin Amis's view that this is a view of a tyrant's world, entirely from the point of view of the tyrant. He goes on to say that this can be seen as an elaborate metaphor for the tyranny of Communist Russia, but I think that this is too fanciful.  It is a portrait of a tyrant, and if you read you undertake a mental complicity with the tyrant's world - but then you can step back. The book swings you in and out of these states - blissful prose, followed  by lists, like the list of Lolita's classmates,that force you to stand apart, thinking why this? But then, I thought, even if it was just a list someone somewhere will have done a semantic assessment of each and every name: the list explained!  Well thank you, Gavriel Shapiro, for doing all that work. But I can't help thinking that all that interpretation he has put in is rather like the statistical search for meaningful names and deaths that a certain sect claimed was the "secret" teaching of the bible, before proper statisticians pointed out that you could get very similar results from Moby Dick - correlation does not equal meaning (click here for this expose).

I found an odd quote from Nabakov, found in Wikipedia (of course) which goes someway to giving me a projected explanation for his writing Lolita:
"Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity."
(My italics)
I'm not sure what "splendid insincerity" means, but I feel it could describe the language and the art that has gone into portraying HH's obsession.

Nabakov's Lolita

I wanted to read some Nabakov after hearing two short stories of his read in New Yorker podcasts.  I have read Lolita many years ago, because, bizarrely it was on a shelf of books at the social work center that I worked at, but I rushed and skipped through it, and I don't remember much.
Immediately, in the first section there are coincidences  links to Marquez - of course they both deal in sexual transgressions, and I'm alert to similarities  picking them out for myself rather than there being any connection   Thus in my readers mind the fact that HH's first love, Annabel abruptly dies of typhus brings the love/ cholera image back.

There are very few similarities  otherwise - Nabakov's writing is just so exquisite, it has none of the baroque style of Marquez.  Externals are called in to being and then elided with the narrators internal state: 

"-But that mimosa grove – the haze of stars, the tingle, the flame, the honey-dew, and the ache remained with me..."

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (Kindle Locations 241-242). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 

HH's biography injcludes snatches of his pastiche …
 Fräulein von Kulp
 may turn, her hand upon the door
; I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
 that Gull.

Nabokov, Vladimir (2012-07-27). Lolita (Kindle Locations 250-252). Penguin Classics. Kindle Edition. 
Nowadays any literary reference is at the mercy of Google, so with a bit of cut and paste I easily track down the reference to T.S. Eliot's Gerontian, and amazingly, because I thought Eliot was still in copyright - though this gutenberg collection doesn't have the Wasteland or the Four Quartets. Nabakov's Lolita is famously full of this kind of reference, so I'm obsessively googling stuff that i don't understand, or going on Kindle dictionary journeys from manque to mansard roof  a 4-side roof where the pitch steepens halfway down - some thing I cam across in  John Updike novel and forgot to look up, or did look up and promptly forgot again.

So let's see what I get for "Keats to Benjamin Bailey".  Well I get one of the real letters, with a first draft of the Human Seasons, and then, wonderfully, I get this:

On the Nabokovian Resonance of “The Proustian Theme in a Letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey”

Sam Slote

Trinity College Dublin

In this paper I examine the ramifications of doubling and repetition in Nabokov’s Lolita, with reference to Proustian notions of recollection, which are adumbrated in the novel at various occasions, such as Humbert’s claim to have written an academic paper titled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey.” I begin by tracing out the contours of what such an article might have been like and then I apply these points to a reading ofLolita.

And am I doing anything less self-referential? And, annoyingly I had to look up the meaning of "adumbrated " 

(1. To give a sketchy outline of. 2. To prefigure indistinctly; foreshadow.3. To disclose partially or guardedly.4. To overshadow; shadow or obscure.

Possibly the thing that caught Nabakov / HH's minds (see already I am confusing narrator and author) is the first line of the letter? "

When a poor devil is drowning, it is said he comes thrice to the surface, ere he makes his final sink  

There's plenty more in the latter that could be referenced, but I do have sense that maybe I should just read on, read on.

LiToC - the END (spoiler: don't if you really don't want to know how it ended)

Finally, the last twenty pages, which are quite moving and unsentimental, as Fermina and Florentino get it together on the river boat they are cruising on, finally turning round and flying the cholera flag so that they have the entire boat (plus crew) to themselves. The relationship is spiky enough, and the acceptance of how old and shriveled and wrinkled they are is not flinched away from.  So, yes , in the end Florentino (who despite his aggressive womanising, maintains that he saved himself a virgin for Fermina) gets his result, although he is saddened by the news that the schoolgirl he seduced has committed suicide. So there's enough moral ambivalence left for to go round for everybody.

What did I learn?  What did I gain? Will I read another Marquez?  Who knows.  I wouldn't buy another, and this one goes in the Oxfam pile.

LiToC Day 18

Only another 2o pages or so.  The love/cholera juxtaposition  the S/Z of the book is finely focused when Florentino calls on Fermina, but suffers a boiling gripe of the bowels such that he has to excuse himself, and shit himself in his carriage. His carriage man finishes off this delicate little passage with the observation, that that looked like cholera. Always a joy to be able to right "that that" in a sentence.  We're moseying down the main straight of the relationship now, and had I had the time, or perhaps the inclination, I would have finished the book off this morning.  And then what? Nabakov, it's got to be Nabakov.

LiToC Day 17

Florentino's obsession magnifies even after Fermina's decisive rejection on the the day of the old man's death (interestingly that's how I see him now - not as the urbane Dr. Urbino), and after her letter full of insults and rage. The epistolary wooing begins again, we're at a symmetrical point in their relationship  though the pages are full or references to age now - the widow who won't let Florentino see her naked now, the view of Florentino himself, the contrast with the young girl he has seduced who he keeps distant from.  The writing has a certain momentum now, it feels as if it is gathering itself for another great storm.

Again I'm tempted to rush the last pages - how long is it going to drag out? - but there aren't that many left, the writing is keeping my interest, so me and Marquez are jogging along to the denouement.

LiToC day 16

Urbino's affair - captures the illicit, fumbling hurrying excitement, again he's writing inflaming stuff for the times.  But the passage where Leoni Cassiani is described as waiting forever for the "the strong young man" who raped her is patently ridiculous fantasy.  What is he intending here? Is it satire or what. It's so baldly stated, so matter of fact, and yet it is part of the plot, the reasons why she does not succumb to Florentino's experienced seducers hand on her thigh.
Was it just to put one in the eye for the feminists of the time??

 I'm intrigued enough to type Leoni Cassiani into Google. Of course the first two results are fucking study guides, one of which introduces a 14 year old girl who Florentino seduces in his old age, who commits suicide when he rejects her.  Thanks very much for the spoiler, not that it matters that much - it's kind of on keeping with what i am investigating.  Interestingly the "study guides" don't mention the rape, in that long tradition of cribs and education that avoids anything it can't explain and sticks to the superficial stuff it can make comments about. Actually that's a bit unfair - later on one of the study guides asks students to discuss and think about "the problematic notion that a young woman, even a child, might enjoy being raped "  (my italics)

Here, in this the critical companion, the author,  Ruben Pelayo,  blathers on that LiToC "fares well under a feminist reading" - women in control of their sexuality, women bounding back from adversity , he says.

There is someone who takes offence, and says because of this , don't bother with this book on the beach - and I'm almost in agreement with her because the Marquez's passage is as crass as she describes it below::
http://www.featheredquill.com/reviews/romance/marquez.shtml

"At one time, Florentino considers pursuing his secretary, Leona Cassiani, and she him, but when she is raped on the beach by an unknown assailant who, we are told, provided her with the best sex she ever had, she no longer has any desire to bed Florentino Ariza. Instead, she walks the beach at night hoping her rapist will ravish her again. As a woman, I was insulted by this passage in the novel, a passage only a man could write. And I was shocked that Oprah Winfrey, a woman who has been so open about her own sexual abuse, could recommend a story in which a character felt this way.

Quill says: Don’t bother taking Love in the Time of Cholera to the seashore this summer; it’s one book you can leave on the shelf."

But, but, but, the review above is from the Romance section of "Feathered Quill" reviews who do say , I quote

 "Every reviewer is carefully selected based on their educational background, expertise, and dedication to reading a broad spectrum of genres. Our reviewers are consummate professionals who are committed to giving you, the consumer, an honest and all-inclusive appraisal, delivered in a timely fashion."

And they are a weird lot - well that's entirely wrong really, they aren't a weird lot, they're very homely and nice, and about 50% of them have a best companion dog / cat with a barfingly yukky name who helps them with their reading. Here's the link so you can see for yourself: http://www.featheredquill.com/aboutus.shtml

So where do i stand? Well I think Marquez's view of rape here is probably not intended to be taken literally, but there are no clues to support that really, it's just taking it on trust as so.  It seems a shame to reject the entire book, and the entire author's oeuvre because of one offensively worded piece.  It seems obvious that it will grate and offend anyone who has been raped, or knows someone who has.  It grates on my reading of the book. So I end up on the fucking fence, in an offended way.

I agree with this reader: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/339634766 .  there's lots of other similar responses, summed up as "Seriously?" , "Really?" "wtf is going on here?".

Of course there are clever academic twists on this theme: says Ruben Pelayo:

 "The best example of a triumphant woman and the antithesis of victim feminism is Leona Cassiani."

Because she isn't defined by the rape etc. etc.  And interestingly in a critique of the film of the book (The Hispanic Connection: Spanish and Spanish-American Literature in the Arts ...By Zenia Sacks Da Silva)  it is said that Leona says something that suggest some complicity in the rape.  As if that made it better, ffs.

So in the end I'm just left with my own response which is, loosely expressed, " Fuck you, Marquez, I don't know what you meant by it - whether you're some sad old misogynist or somehow your "art" lets you get away with it. I don't take it literally, I just don't understand it."

LiToC Day15

The story of Urbino & Fermina's marriage begins get fuller, and I begin to like them, and the book more.  We've got these stages:

• Courtship 
• Honeymoon
• Return from Paris, unhappy years living at the Urbino family home with his sharp tongued, repectable mother
• Another sojourn in Europe, where they become in love again
• The return from Europe on the matriarch's death, and a period of greater happiness.

It summed up on p224, saying that after 30 years they were like a "single divided being" The a nice passage about overcoming the "conjugal conspiracy" - rising above the petty hates and feuds that can arise when two people just share their lives in a marriage together without thought or depth, when they "loved each other best without hurry or excess".

It's a great paragraph setting out what a marriage could be, what it should be, and I like it for that, but somehow it lacks warmth, emotion, depth of feeling. It feels almost sentimental in this context.  I find it hard to see and picture either of them as actual people, they appear in the text as social shells, with inner lives for sure, but nothing I really connect with.

I've just got to the affair that Fermina scents (literally - she smells Miss Lynch's health on his clothes). It's another piece of repressed sensuality, as he palpates Miss :Lynch's full beauttiful body. But I've found that I am speeding over text and language that I should be reading more slowly. Partly it is because I need to go out and get some fresh air, common or garden ordinary reasons to stop reading, partly it is because, again it overflows with ripeness and eroticism that isn't, well, that erotic, it's too controlled maybe?  I haven't finished this passage - maybe it will become more compelling.

LiToC Day 14

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. 

LiToC Day 13

one after the other the set pieces roll by.  Urbino meets Florentino, as a cyclone passes by and wrecks half the town (the latter  mentioned in passing in one sentence). Florentino has a realisation of the heart that they share the same obsession. I could go on, listing the events, more sparsely of course than Marquez does.  The weird winning of the Golden Orchid poetry prize by Chinese person, immigrants to the Caribbean looked down upon as all newest immigrants are, by everybody else.  Fermina gives the prize, reads the sonnet  So what, so what. Then the bizarre.  Florentino's new relationship with the woman who has to suck on a babies dummy to come. There's humour in the cat who scratches and bites at them as they topple on it in their first feverish bout of attempted sex - but I missed it entirely  in terms of any humour that is. I just thought back as I wrote this, and thought, well that's supposed to be funny isn't it?  Can't even crack a smile now.

This is the point at which I would usually give up on such a book - maybe speed read it to the end to see if it improves, but since I'm writing a blog about it I would like to finish that more than the book.  Somehow they both have to go to completion, and then I can get on to reading some Nabakov.

The there is the spell checker.  Google tells me that American english is all I've got :
American English:

Google Chrome is displayed in this language

This language is used for spell checking

English English, however:

Google Chrome cannot be displayed in this language

This language cannot be used for spell checking

Great. I can realize but I can't realise.

LiToc Day 12

Florentino continues to binge on unrequited love, while also seeking out other women whenever he can, able only to write love letters, still pouring his essence into declarations on behalf of others.  It's a strange kind of proxy life, slightly irritating to read. His meeting with Ausencia Santander recalls the earlier encounter with Rosalba, but this is a longer sensuality, that picks up again another portrayal of what he sees as the ferocious sexuality of women ( which is there in Fermina as well, despite her reserve). So where's it all heading? The writing's good enough to keep on ploughing through a text that just keeps my interest piqued.  Maybe I'm in the wrong mood or place for this kind of book. I think one of the problems is distance - I feel that I'm looking at this story in all its exotic picaresque glory though a telescope, enough to focus on the paragraph I'm reading but without getting any sense of a wider perspective. Put another way, I'm handling the beads of a rosary one by one, without much meaning attaching to the process, I'm just plodding on from page to page. Going up a long set of steps hoping that there's going to be something at the top. Page 182 now, my reading is slowing down.

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.

Reading LiToC day 10

I think I read a small snatch yesterday, seduced away from it by a book parallel translation spanish short stories, to the pictures to see Lincoln, made marmalade, studied Spanish, programmed, wrote, did STUFF all day. I'm at p146 of the Penguin edition, where Florentino's obsessional love turns to jealousy rather than just unrequited passion. So nearly half way through, and yes I want to know , at a very basic level, what happens next, I am enjoying the density of the writing now, but more than anything I like the consistent compression (e.g Fermina's chamber pot desires  mentioned earlier) and juxtaposition of images, love/cholera, sewage/ exotic surroundings. 

LiToC Day 9

I didn't read that much yesterday - I'm still enjoying the book I think, and I think I'd like to take apart what it means when we enjoy a book - must cover a multitude of sins from the luke-warm sudsy bath of whatever I read that gets near to Mills & Boon to the this is good, so it must be good to read, but I'm not sure I want to read it now.  I got to the latter end of the continuum with LiToC last night.  I wanted to read it, but also had a resistance to it, I wanted something more soapy and easy on the reading skin, this one is a bit, not abrasive, but faintly difficult to the touch, like you are running your hand over a  plank of wood and can feel the roughness, wary of a splinter that will surely rise up when you least expect it, or dusty rougher portions that don't feel nice to the touch.

Images from yesterday - the three bodies floating down the stream, one of them a girl, and their contamination of Armino's infatuation with Fremina.  And then of course, amidst the confining on the boat, the image of him  being grabbed and rode to orgasm in a dark sweaty cabin, before being ejected without identifying who it was he fucked - or who fucked him more to the point.  A good image for the solace of sexual release - "Sex without love may be an empty pleasure, but as empty pleasures go..." - Woody Allen (Love & Death).

An aside. That's weird - the Google blogger spellchecker has "fucked" in its dictionary, but not "luke" as in luke warm.  Why?? What happened to "luke". Beginning to suspect a bit of early onset here - maybe I'm wrong and it is spelt completely differently - nah, Word knows all about "luke". 
So he gets there - this long journey up the river and decides to return immediately.  It's like watching one of those TV series where you just know the character is going to do the wrong thing anyway and fuck it all up again, so an air of inevitability here.

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.