Thoughts Concerning Love in the Time of Cholera

I was about 20 pages into this novel before I decided it was at least worth finishing; it was another 50 before I was interested in what was happening; and even by the end, I wasn't entirely buying any of the characters (I was apathetic towards most of them, at best) — and occasionally the story would lose me for a paragraph or two before it pulled me back in.

And yet: at some point, I was hooked. Even with all of those aspects I didn't care for in Love in the Time of Cholera (trans. 1988), there's no mistaking the end result: a beautifully crafted novel that explores all types of love (familial, platonic, physical, emotional, young, mature, etc.) over the course of more than half a century (from the last 1800s thru the 1930s).

And with love — time, death, and aging are also central motifs, all of which are occasionally described in such intriguing language that I can't help but wish I knew Spanish so that I could read the book in its original dialect (author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is Colombian).

But then again: at other points, I was rolling my eyes at the melodrama and wondering if people like that really ever existed — even on some unnamed Caribbean island at the turn of the century (about which I know next to nothing).

The emotion behind the actions and words, however, remains timeless — and so propels the suspense that kept me wondering if the man (Florentino Ariza) and the woman (Fermina Daza) at the novel's center would ever even talk to one another (never mind, engage in a relationship of any sort).

Marquez stitches the pages together by traveling back and forth through decades, exploring the perspectives of various characters on multiple occasions, thereby creating one cohesive storyline by the final page.

Overall: definitely worth the read. And, yeah, contrary to what I told people 50 pages in... I probably will try 100 Years of Solitude (perhaps Marquez's best-known work) one of these days.

Thoughts Concerning Slaughterhouse Five

I've decided that by the end of this summer, I'll have read (or at least attempted to read — I don't have the time for things that don't interest me) every work of fiction on my bookshelf previously untouched by me.

And if my current pace continues, it shouldn't take too long.

Now, granted, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five is a relatively short novel, but it also helped to remind me that when you really get into a story you can't put it down — and before you know it, 48 hours have passed between the first and last page and you're so thoroughly emerged in someone else's universe that you can scarcely return to your own.

Which is fitting, given the subject material: a semi-autobiographical sketch of Vonnegut's time spent as an American prisoner of War at a German work camp (literally: a slaughterhouse) in Dresden (which would be destroyed in a controversial firebombing while Vonnegut was still prisoner there). And while he, himself, is a minor character in the book — occasionally shouting lines and expressions that the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, overhears — it is important to remember that Vonnegut was a science fiction writer, and this World War II story is no exception.

Rather, Pilgrim himself is a POW at the same camp... and not to mention, a time traveler (but in a way that borders on PTSD) who is captured by aliens sometime after the war. The resultant narration thus jumps back and forth in time, between the present (late 1960s), early childhood, early adulthood, the war and so much in-between.

In many ways the past, present and future overlap, with Pilgrim being taught by his alien captors that time is a construct — the brainchild of shortsighted humans who mourn death without appreciating life.

And as with Flaubert: it was easy for me to see why this had been (and continues to be) so well-regarded. Only one thing really bothered me — the constant repetition of "so it goes" after every story, description and side note regarding death and dying. I understood the point, but that didn't make it any less annoying.

Also of note: this book is subtitled, "The Children's Crusade." And for good reason — a good percentage of our military force was (and continues to be) kids straight out of high school.

Thoughts Concerning Madame Bovary

After 4 years of college and 2 more of grad school (both studying literature) — and five years spent learning the French language (and, no, I still can't really speak it) — I have finally read one of Gustave Flaubert's most notable works and can't for the life of me understand why it was never assigned.

I actually read the first chapter a dozen or so times over the past few months, unable to really submerge myself in anything other than Harry Potter and quick hits of poetry.

But I'm back, and reading with a vengeance.

And as for Madame Bovary: once I made it past the first chapter, I was hooked... marveling at Flaubert's understanding of the human psyche, and underlining passages and phrases as though I might be writing a research paper (and forming at thesis) at the end of the term.

The book chronicles the moral collapse of a provincial woman who becomes bored with her small-town doctor husband (who loves her dearly). Emma Bovary has big aspirations in life, and resents being held back by the limitations of her gender in 19th century French society... and not to mention, she could really use a little more disposable income.

But Emma is not entirely the "c you next Tuesday" I may have hitherto portrayed her as being: she is capable of great sympathy and remorse, even at those points when she is unable to control her emotions... and even as she acts out against her husband, who is completely undeserving of her biting remarks.

In fact, her mood fluctuations led me to believe that she might have been what we today term "bipolar" — at times very warm and kind; one moment, passionate and willing to give everything she owns to the world. And the next... spending everything on herself and slinking away into a deep depression.

What amazed me all the while was the third-person omniscient voice that speaks the thoughts and actions of so many characters, with Flaubert brilliantly tapping into the minds of countless personality types. I found his characters to be so believable — even though they are 150 years in the past — because I understood them in a way that pervades time and place.

It was easy for me to see, however, why Flaubert was charged with indecency for this novel; and it was easy for me to see how he was able to escape a conviction on the grounds that Emma — and her entire family — suffers greatly for her sins.

And that is where the novel loses me, for a bit. I could almost sense Flaubert methodically adding plot devices and morals to the closing chapters — all a means of validation, should the preceding pages get him into legal trouble.

That bothered me a bit, as it took a subtle message and made it shout like an impassioned courthouse rebuttal.

And yet: I couldn't help but think that Gustave was smiling wryly as he composed those pages, understanding better than most that no good deed goes unpunished.

A Novel Idea

The rules:
bold = what you’ve read,
italics = books you started but couldn’t finish
crossed out = books you hated
* = you’ve read more than once
underline = books you own but haven’t read yourself... yet
( ) = You've seen the movie. (I added this one — go figure)

1 (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide) by Douglas Adams
2 Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
3 (The Kite Runner) by Khaled Hosseini
4 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
5 Life of Pi: a novel by Yann Martel
6 Don Quixote by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
7 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
8 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9 Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
10 The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
11 Ulysses by James Joyce
12 War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
13 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
14 The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
15 Catch-22 a novel by Joseph Heller
16 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte*
17 The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
18 Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle I) by Neal Stephenson
19 A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
20 The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
21 Middlemarch by George Eliot
22 Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
23 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
24 The Kor'an by Anonymous (I've read bits and pieces)
25 Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26 The Odyssey by Homer
27 The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
28 Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (it's next on my reading list)
29 The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
30 The Historian : a novel by Elizabeth Kostova
31 Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
32 Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
33 The History of Tom Jones, a foundling by Henry Fielding
34 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
35 (The Count of Monte Cristo) by Alexandre Dumas
36 The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner*
37 The Iliad by Homer
38 Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
39 Emma by Jane Austen
40 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
41 Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
42 Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
43 The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44 (Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies) by Jared Diamond
45 (Dracula) by Bram Stoker
46 Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence
47 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
48 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
49 The Once and Future King by T. H. White
50 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
51 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
52 Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
53 Oryx and Crake : a novel by Margaret Atwood
54 (Great Expectations) by Charles Dickens
55 Labyrinth by Kate Mosse
56 Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
57 Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
58 The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen*
59 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
60 Underworld by Don DeLillo
61 Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
62 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
63 ((Jane Eyre)) by Charlotte Bronte*
64 The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake
65 The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
66 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
67 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
68 Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
69 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce*
70 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
71 The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
72 The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
73 Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
74 The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
75 Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
76 The Poisonwood Bible : a novel by Barbara Kingsolver
77 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay : a novel by Michael Chabon
78 Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
79 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
80 Silas Marner by George Eliot
81 The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde*
82 The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas
83 The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
84 The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
85 The Confusion by Neal Stephenson
86 (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) by Ken Kesey
87 Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
88 Bleak House by Charles Dickens
89 The System of the World by Neal Stephenson
90 The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and… by Brian Greene
91 Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
92 The Known World by Edward P. Jones
93 The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
94 The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
95 The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje*
96 Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
97 Dubliners by James Joyce
98 Les misérables by Victor Hugo
99 The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan
100 Infinite Jest : a novel by David Foster Wallace
101 Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
102 Beloved: a novel by Toni Morrison
103 Persuasion by Jane Austen
104 (A Clockwork Orange) by Anthony Burgess
105 The Personal History of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
106 Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Very unimpressive, I know. And like the friends who've also participated in this meme, most (but not all) of those noted as owned and/or read above are a result of my studies... which isn't to say I didn't enjoy them all the same (particularly The English Patient — perhaps one of the most beautifully poetic novels I've ever been assigned).

Exceptions include The Corrections, Hitchhiker's Guide and Madame Bovary... the first two I read independently and loved; the last I'm reading now.

Also of note, I'm just OCD enough that when I was initially tagged for this meme, I went though and capitalized all of the book titles that were in need of it.

Yeah, I have problems.