'Time, love, age, memory, death, chaos, passion and the spirit of place: this capacious novel wraps its arms effortlessly around all the great themes while entertaining us with a funny and wistful love story set beside the Caribbean' - Observer

'An anatomy of love in all its forms ... The novel's other great subject, like Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, is time - how memory transfigures and redeems all that has gone before ... Mr García Márquez has revealed how the extraordinary is contained in the ordinary ... The result is a rich, commodious novel, a novel whose narrative power is matched only by its generosity of vision' - The New York Times

'An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women. In part it is a brilliantly witty account of the tussles in a long marriage, whose details are curiously moving; elsewhere it is a fantastic tale of love finding erotic fulfilment in ageing bodies ... The richness, delicacy and resonance of this fable places it among Márquez's best fiction' - The Times

'A delight. The interlocking stories, the fantastical and obsessional aspects of Márquez have never been better shown'
- Melvyn Bragg in the Independent

 

 
This BBC Big Read book has me both curious and apprehensive. On the one hand it could be really good, and a tender love story. Or it'll be a wishy washy romance that churns my insides. I really hope it's good, as it's next on my to read list, I guess we'll find out soon.

 

 
March 10th 2004
Up to page 63

This is a very strange book, and one I'm not certain I'm enjoying. On the one hand I love the writing style, which is full of beautiful language and is extremely verbose with lovely vocabulary usage. The sentence structure is poetic and enchanting, and very descriptive. However, the subject matter doesn't interest me at all.

The book begins with a wonderfully gripping scene in which an elderly doctor attends the scene of his best friend's suicide. He's not a particularly likeable character, and is dispatched of fairly swiftly so the story can concentrate on the point of the book; his widow's romance with a man she rejected as a young woman. His undying devotion and adoration for her has simmered unrequited for half a century, and now he is able to once more declare himself.

So as one of the most cynical and unromantic people I know this deeply disturbed and unhinged behaviour makes me balk. This isn't love, it's stalking! I just can't feel any sense of sympathy for characters that behave in such an impractical and disturbing way, and that he thinks it's ok to begin his pursuit of his quarry at her husband's funeral really is vile!

I can understand why people are attracted to this book, the whole thing about fate and there being one person you instinctively believe you should be with has become idealised in our culture as a wonderfully romantic notion. Personally though I find the whole thing unsavoury and sad, rather than romantic. Pining away for someone you can't have is pointless and self-destructive, and even if you got them the idea of them would be so much better than the reality of their farting and dirty undies on the bathroom floor, so there's no possibility of your expectations living up to the fantasy. Unrequited love sucks, and should be fought against rather than painted as romantic. It's just not!

 Phew, now I've got that off my chest, back to the book. So the story makes me cross, but the writing is wonderful and so I've decided to relegate this book to my 'dip in and out' pile. There's no way I'm going to read this from cover to cover as the story just doesn't grip me enough, but it is a nice relaxing read when I'm in the mood for a few minutes gentle reading. So that's what I'm going to do with it. Maybe the whole love story will stop being so desperately irritating, but I fear the very worst.

 

 
August 1st 2004

Since I relegated it to dip in and out of status I've not so much as touched this book, and so I've decided to set it aside for the time being and hopefully come back to it at a later date when I don't have quite so many good books to read.