Thank you, Richard Price

“Reading Catcher in the Rye when you’re fourteen is like Jesus came down and slapped you.”

(possibly misquoted from an interview in the May 2008 issue of The Believer)

Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez is my celebrity crush. The characters he writes make gorging oneself on dirt clods and chugging perfume seem like the logical manifestations of heartbreak and desire. If anyone’s books deserve to be reread, they are his. I know people who say they never reread books. I am obviously not in this camp, and to these people I say, “Read Love in the Time of Cholera at least twice, ideally sandwiching romantic entanglements between readings, imbibing cologne until you’re good and rowdy – at which point you must put down the book and get thee to a brothel.”

I first read Love in the Time of Cholera on the heels of 100 Years of Solitude, an admittedly tough act to follow – and I didn’t really get into it. So an underdog type pledges undying love to a woman who marries someone else, biding his time until her husband dies by notching his own bedpost until he’s sleeping on a toothpick – so what? I am a cold woman. In my experience, the wooing stage can only last so long before it’s time to get used to the idea that it ain’t never gonna happen. If you can’t handle setting things in motion, you should cut your losses and set your sights elsewhere. My romantic pragmatism originally made it hard for me to sympathise with the lovelorn protagonist Florentino Ariza, who finds a kind of nobility in suffering for love. Buddhists may claim that suffering is at the heart of the human experience, but I dig emotional comfort, so Ariza’s line was just not my jam.

However. I did write previously that there is no safety without danger, and there is, similarly, no comfort without discomfort. So after reading this book a second time, I think I get it. Ariza holds out hope that he and his beloved will be together one day because, after all that bad, the good would be so good, mindblowingly good. I once dated a guy who said all he wanted to do was relax. Maybe it works for him, but it wasn’t long before I felt like boredom was melting my brain all over the bedsheets, because relaxation only exists in opposition to action – and there wasn’t a whole lot of that. Smoking a joint in bed feels great if you’ve been ripping up the dancefloor all night, but it feels like premature retirement if all you’ve done all day is strenuous shit like smoking joints in an upright position.

That said, Márquez’s writing is over the top beautiful, but I was still frustrated with Ariza the second time around. Because this is somewhat optimistic fiction, he does get the girl in the end (spoiler! But you know it’s coming, really), but a real-life Ariza could never exist. Because, when it comes to romance, humans want to survive, and, when it comes to sexuality, humans are ignoble genitals with limbs attached. If I had a friend like Ariza, we’d sit down for a pint of Chanel No. 5 and I’d tell him the score.

This is actually a really good read.