Sarah Cypher

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I spent two weeks of my reading life. That’s how long it took to get through Love in the Time of Cholera. I read first with a kind of tingly enthusiasm, reunited with the work of one of my favorite authors. Then with a growing sense of duty. Then with fear that the novel’s sprawling backstory was really going to account for all six hundred and twenty-two (give or take) of Florentino Ariza’s lovers as he grew to old age, waiting for Fermina Daza to become a widow.

Perhaps it is unfair of me to expect brilliance from all of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, but 270 pages in to this one, I finally succumbed to the temptation to scan. I slowed for the final fifteen pages, which reinforced my view of Florentino Ariza as a tepid protagonist. He made me think of leeches, parasites, little rodents living in the wall.

For a novel ostensibly about love, the only reciprocal love I believe is that of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour and his Haitian lover. All else feels stained by conditions, regret, empty lust, and equally empty longing. These are the faces of other loves, yes, but they lose even this credibility by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s final failure to make us feel that the love that settles between Florentino and Fermina is truly “the heart of love.” This comes after 350 pages of uninterrupted narration and our loss of respect for Florentino–given his pedophilic dalliance and his hand in the deaths of both his child-lover and the river over which he had responsibility. Maybe it’s fitting is that the book’s final image is of a plague boat doomed to sail up and down a dead river, carrying its dying lovers between pestilential cities.

One Hundred Years of Solitude left me longing to become a better writer, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores impressed me with its uncharacteristic brevity and tricky, magical ordinariness. Although Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s wisdom and insight make so much of Love in the Time of Cholera awe-inspiring to a fellow writer, after I set it down with a final thump on my coffee table, I couldn’t help thinking of Twitter’s irreverent #lessambitiousbooks game: Old Pervert’s Crush in the Time of Cholera.

Or maybe you can think of a better re-title?

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well-crafted, straightforward, and rendered beautifully, the novel is a public monument to the barefaced sexism of yore. As in most of the novels I enjoy reading, power matters. And as a novel about the friction between authority (Nurse Ratched) and freedom (McMurphy), it holds up almost fifty years after its first publication; it would had survived better, though, if it made less of the “emasculating woman” stereotype. In the tense final pages, when I most wanted to surrender to the story, the novel’s sensibility wouldn’t let me forget its insistent theme: “This is the outrage, the injustice, that results when a woman who can’t get laid has too much power.”

Ugh. For sensibility, I’d give the novel one and a half stars. But as Azar Nafisi reminds us in the Henry James portion of Reading Lolita in Tehran, to judge a book solely on the basis of your own values diminishes the art of writing. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a damn good novel, and its carelessness toward the women’s and civil rights movements of its day shouldn’t be confused with a dead heart. As a Pacific Northwest writer, Kesey was sensitive to the plight of Native Americans, and the gentleness and magic with which he wrote Bromden’s POV made this more than just a well-plotted story.

So, finally–I read the famous book. As a writer, I learned more about not getting carried away with the beauty of language, and how to keep it under control. From a cultural perspective, I’d say it’s valuable to look at the art that enters popular culture with your own eyes; for years, I knew what people meant when they called someone a “Nurse Ratched.” Yet now, I wonder about her. Her character was awful, but what made her that way? The Combine? The culture? Her story never had a chance to be told before she entered the American lexicon as a synonym for medical violence. I even have a little underdog-inspired curiosity about her, no thanks to her creator.

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