Like so many others, I waited for the appearance of this new novel by García Márquez with great impatience, almost the way my Southern ancestors used to wait for the serialized editions of Sir Walter Scott to appear on the quays and wharves of Richmond, Charleston, or New Orleans. These were the books, my forebears thought, that would tell them how to live, how to honor, how to love. And we, poor literarily impoverished gringos, have come to expect something similar from García Márquez. Twenty years ago (can it really be as long ago as that?) One Hundred Years of Solitude stood us on our heads, and it still does. In all the aridity of post-Modernism in Europe and the United States, with all its minimalist, frozen Robbe-Grillets and its clever Calvinos and its playfully leaden Pyncheons, here in One Hundred Years, and The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Chronicle of a Death Foretold, was what our tired, etiolated Anglo world needed: a breath of fresh, libidinous air, a whiff of tropical exoticism, a whooping Latinate Rabelaisianism that would let us see how we had withered, what we had lost by being so damned civilized for so dammed long.
Well, now at last we have Love in the Time of Cholera, which appeared two years ago in Colombia as El amor en los tiempos del cólera under García Márquez's own imprint of Oveja Negra (Black Sheep), the press that he both subsidizes and owns, and that wields tremendous literary and political influence in his native country, and indeed throughout Latin America. Knopf, its American publisher, is aiming high: The book's first printing is set at 100,000 copies, and the book clubs have snapped it up as though García Márquez were Danielle Steele or Judith Krantz. As well he may be, with a Latin twist, and a Nobel Prize. I predict that the new novel will receive no bad reviews, as perhaps it should not, when considered alongside the shrill silliness of Brett Easton Ellis or Tama Janowitz or Martin Amis, nonwriters all of nonbooks. Even against our current best (Barth, say, or Updike or Coover), García Márquez looks good. But still, it is time to look at the emperor, and see about those new clothes.
Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez has said in several recent interviews, has its germ or kernel in two events from his past: what he was told of the difficult early years of his own parents' relationship, kept apart by their own worried parents, frustrated in their touching attempts to marry and set up housekeeping; and what he remembered from an old newspaper clipping about a pair of elderly constant lovers, married but not to each other, who met every year for trysts on a riverboat until they were murdered by bandits who beat them to death with oars for what little change they might have had about them.
These two fragments of memory were sufficient for García Márquez: From them he could write a novel about how tenacious young love is; and how, if it is strong enough, it can endure with romantic zeal almost unabated into extreme old age. Good enough: Here is Gabriel García Márquez, a smiling sixty-year-old public man, writing his prose version of Yeats' "Among School Children." Bodies and minds decay, but love need not, as long as the dance is kept in motion. This dance is what Love in the Time of Cholera is about, and it is no small theme, and I do not mean to scoff. Carlos Fuentes, the Mexican novelist and literary prom-trotter, dealt with something like the same theme twenty-six years ago in his dazzling Gothic novella, Aura, and it worked, the most beautiful nightmare in modern fiction: an ancient, hideous crone using the wraith of her former seductive self to
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