LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

• How is this story structured?

• How does time function?

• How are the “chapters” broken up?

• How is the plot different from other romances?

COMPOSITION

Yes, and those two years when I was writing it was a time when I was almost completely happy. Everything went well for me. People spend a lifetime thinking about how they would really like to live. I asked my friends and no one seems to know very clearly. To me it's very clear now. I wish my life could have been like the years when I was writing ''Love in the Time of Cholera.'' I would get up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning. I need only six hours of sleep. Then I quickly listened to the news. I would read from 6 to 8, because if I don't read at that time I won't get around to it anymore. I lose my rhythm. Someone would arrive at the house with fresh fish or lobster or shrimp caught nearby. Then I would write from 8 till 1. By midday, Mercedes [ his wife ] would go to the beach and wait for me with friends. I never quite knew who to expect; there were always people coming and going. After lunch I had a little siesta. And when the sun started going down I would go out on the street to look for places where my characters would go, to talk to people and pick up language and atmosphere. So the next morning I would have fresh material I had brought from the streets.

From “The Best Years of His Life: An Interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez” By Marlise Simons New York Times

NOBEL PRIZELatin America neither wants, nor has any reason, to be a pawn without a will of its own; nor is it merely wishful thinking that its quest for independence and originality should become a Western aspiration. However, the navigational advances that have narrowed such distances between our Americas and Europe seem, conversely, to have accentuated our cultural remoteness. Why is the originality so readily granted us in literature so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change? Why think that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions? No: the immeasurable violence and pain of our history are the result of age-old inequities and untold bitterness, and not a conspiracy plotted three thousand leagues from our home. But many European leaders and thinkers have thought so, with the childishness of old-timers who have forgotten the fruitful excess of their youth as if it were impossible to find another destiny than to live at the mercy of the two great masters of the world. This, my friends, is the very scale of our solitude.

The playful, imperturbable Gabriel Garcia Marquez was troubled and tense. His brown eyes and the large wart over his mustache seemed to have shrunk. He had buried his hands deep in the pockets of his navy blue overalls and paced his hotel room in this small Central Mexican town, where he had come to escape a barrage of well-wishers and journalists.

''This is the time I'm supposed to be happier than ever,'' he grumbled. ''I've just received the Nobel Prize. I'm going to Sweden. I'm famous. I don't have to work. And look at the state I'm in.''

Garcia Marquez was fretting over the speech he must deliver at the Nobel Prize award ceremony in Sweden on Friday. He had already studied other Nobel speeches for length, tone and content. Researchers, whom he calls ''my ghostwriters,'' were digging up facts and statistics on Latin America, not to be used as such but to give him ideas. ''It has to be a political speech presented as literature,'' he sighed. ''I envy the chemists and the Peace Prize winners. They don't have to say a word and everyone applauds anyway.'' What's worse, he muttered on, ''I've heard that the Swedish Academy is a solemn clan out to make me over. And I have to wear a tail coat, a colonial costume, an upper-class outfit from the 19th century. I will feel terrible.''

FROM “A TALK WITH GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ” BY MARLISE SIMONS NEW YORK TIMES

How does Marquez’s working class persona contradict the character of Urbino?

A TRAP?

How does Florentino change on page 272? How does the novel change?

And the men? How did you feel about Florentino?

I don't really like him. I think he is very selfish, like all men are. And as for Fermina, I think she became more bourgeois than she realized. That changed her a lot and made her very pretentious. She only understood that by the time she was very old, when she agreed to go on the boat. To do that, she had to break with her whole life. But there is another important character, one that has no name - and that is the society of the Caribbean coast, its prejudice and superstitions, its old-fashioned ways. This is what really drives the whole story.

From “The Best Years of His Life: An Interview with Gabriel Garcia Marquez By Marlise Simons New York Times

FLORENTINOVERSUSJUVENAL

Is there a case to be made for foils being a necessary element of the romantic mode?

Why does Fermina marry Juvenal?

Sexual Love

Spiritual Love

Young Love

Old Love

Fetish

KINDS OF LOVE

GABO’S PARENTS

                                                                                                         Gabo's Mom and Dad: Luisa Márquez de García and Gabriel Eligio García.

                                                                                                         Gabo's Mom and Dad: Luisa Márquez de García and Gabriel Eligio García.

                                                                                                         Gabo's Mom and Dad: Luisa Márquez de García and Gabriel Eligio García.

Luisa Márquez de García and Gabriel Eligio García

Queering Cholera

• All kinds of love, except homosexual…

• Crossdressing? (p. 174)

• Florentino, a homosexual?

(p. 283, 303)

QUEERING LOVE

RACISM• Chinese Racism (pp.193-195)

• Black Racism (p. 250)

• For such a masculine writer, does Marquez write Fermina well? Does he know a woman’s psyche? (p. 207)

• Is this novel pro-feminist? (p. 302)

• Does the romance genre tend towards feminism?

FEMINISM

• A “bolero”

• His “Crowned Goddess” waltz on the violin

• Florentino’s love of “popular music”

(p. 190)

• A Neopolitan romanza p. 264

• Tosca p. 268

• p. 284, p. 288, etc!

MUSIC

MAGICAL REALISMLO REAL MARAVILLOSO

How does magical realism differ from realism or typical

romances?

This conviction became even more bitter after the fear caused by the black doll that was sent to her without any letter, but whose origin seemed easy enough to imagine:  only Dr. Juvenal Urbino could have sent it.  It had been bought in Martinique, according to the original tag, and it was dressed in an exquisite gown, its hair rippled with gold threads and it closed its eyes when it was laid down.  It seemed so charming to Fermina Daza that she overcame her scruples and laid it on her pillow during the day and grew accustomed to sleeping with it at night.  After a time, however, she discovered when she awoke from an exhusting dream that the doll was growing:  the original exquisite dress she had arrived in was up above her thighs, and her shoes had burst from the pressure of her feet.  Fermina Daza had heard of African spells, but none as frightening as this.  (p. 125)

IneluctableMarasmusParsimoniousAuscultationAtavisticBlennorrhagiasCrepuscularPassementerie

VOCABULARY

Edith Grossman(also translated Don Quixote!)

"Fidelity is surely our highest aim, but a translation is not made with tracing paper. It is an act of critical interpretation. Let me insist on the obvious: Languages trail immense, individual histories behind them, and no two languages, with all their accretions of tradition and culture, ever dovetail perfectly. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that either translation or photography, or acting for that matter, are representational in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is our noble purpose, but it does not have much, if anything, to do with what is called literal meaning. A translation can be faithful to tone and intention, to meaning. It can rarely be faithful to words or syntax, for these are peculiar to specific languages and are not transferable."

Pablo Neruda!

Marquez getting frisky!

Punched by Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa

CASTRO

SHAKIRA!

-Steve Martin, from “Writing is Easy”

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA: WHY IT'S A BAD TITLE

I admit that "Love in the time of . . ." is a great title, up to a point. You're reading along, you're happy, it's about love. I like the way the word time comes in - a nice, nice feeling. Then the morbid Cholera appears. I was happy till then. Why not "Love in the Time of the Blue, Blue, Bluebirds"? "Love in the Time of Oozing Sores and Pustules" is probably an earlier title the author used as he was writing in a rat-infested tree house on an old Smith Corona. This writer, whoever he is, could have used a couple of weeks in Pacific Daylight Time.