I have been meaning to read this book for years, and I finally decided that it was time after watching the movie Serendipity, which is without question one of the best five movies ever made. Lars the Swedish new age wind musician guy, Eugene Levy as the uptight salesperson, John Cusack looking all shaggy and adorable, Jeremy Piven before he ate all that mercury and became an a-hole, Molly Shannon...doesn't get better than that.
It's hard to come up with one word to describe this book because it is beautiful, disgusting, funny, heartbreaking, disturbing all at the same time... For example: "But first he enjoyed the immediate pleasure of smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus." As I read this book, I keep thinking about the coexistence of the beautiful and the ugly. The story takes place in this old Caribbean city full of mango trees, exotic birds, and ocean views, but also suffering from poverty and war and teeming with pathogens. Dr. Urbino is at times a respectable doctor and loving husband and at times an insufferable and shallow bore. Florentino writes love poems and cherishes this pure adulation of his longtime love, and he also has seriously gross personal habits and has indiscriminate sex with "little birds" who he hunts down in the streets. No character is completely likable, but no one is completely unredeemable either. But that's life isn't it? No city is totally clean, no relationship is always harmonious, no one who you love is as great as you hope they are. However, there's still plenty of beauty to go around, and all you have to do is read Marquez to find some:
"She put her palette down on a chair and tiptoed to the window, her ruffled skirt raised to keep it from dragging on the floor. She wore a diadem with a jewel that hung on her forehead, and the luminous stone was the same aloof color as her eyes, and everything in her breathed an aura of coolness."
"She clung to her husband. And it was just at the time when he needed her most, because he suffered the disadvantage of being ten years ahead of her as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age, with the even greater disadvantage of being a man and weaker than she was. In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other's thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore."
No comments:
Post a Comment