Friday, September 25, 2009

Love in the Time of Cholera

AT LONG LAST, VICTORY IS MINE! I have finally waded the ENTIRE WAY through a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, overcoming a forty-one year losing streak when it comes to reading his over-written, but nonetheless award-winning oeuvre. Love in the Time of Cholera is the most readable of Mr. Marquez's works, certainly more so for me than the ironically titled One Hundred Years of Solitude, doomed to languish unloved and unfinished for at least that long on my bookshelf. Old Gabo just doesn't appeal. At bottom, I don't like all his . . . words. Those wordy wordy words that are too wordy. As I told a friend this morning, sifting through Mr. Marquez's colorfully translated prose to find a plot line is like stepping into one of those ropey East Tennessee spider webs. You're so caught up in trying to unwind yourself and understand what in the hell the sticky mess is and oh my god are there spiders crawling on my body--MAYBE EVEN HUNDREDS OF TINY BABY SPIDERS--that you completely lose track of where you're going.

It's like that, only for four hundred pages.

So I'm glad to be done with it, and I'm ready for something different. Something a bit more spare.

Suggestions are welcome.

3 comments:

big genie said...

Sounds like a Thomas Pynchon novel.

Unknown said...

You could try "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins (http://www.amazon.com/Hunger-Games-Suzanne-Collins/dp/0439023483).
Hannah dubbed it "the new Twilight" when she asked me to buy it for her at the school book fair. Now, I'm anxiously wishing she'd finish the sequel so I can get my hands on it.

Anonymous said...

So glad it's not just me! I tried so hard to complete "100 Years" and just couldn't!