{"id":641,"date":"2009-11-25T12:07:22","date_gmt":"2009-11-25T11:07:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=641"},"modified":"2023-05-09T16:07:03","modified_gmt":"2023-05-09T15:07:03","slug":"marquez-revisited","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/?page_id=641","title":{"rendered":"M\u00e1rquez Revisited"},"content":{"rendered":"

Re-reading M\u00e1rquez<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\"\"<\/p>\n

Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, Love in the Time of Cholera<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Penguin New Edition, as part of a reissue of the complete set of his novels.<\/p>\n

No novelist since Proust has had a more acute sense of smell than M\u00e1rquez . Penguin should have reissued these books with sprayed strips of paper interspersed between the leaves, like a perfumerie.\u00a0 The hot still air of his un-named Caribbean\u00a0 port , the \u2018city of the Viceroys\u2019, is enveloped by the \u2018the tender breath of human shit, warm and sad,\u2019 against which his protagonists wear imported Cologne from Farina Gegenuber and the houses are filled with pots of heliotrope to perfume the dusk.<\/p>\n

For fifty odd years the melancholy Florentino Ariza pursues the gardenia scent of Fermina Diaz, the married woman he loves so hopelessly,\u00a0 roaming the city to revisit places where he thinks he will smell her presence.\u00a0 And Fermina herself discovers that her husband is cheating on her, the most traumatic moment of the marriage, when she detects the odour of a black woman on his laundry when she sniffs it, as is her custom.\u00a0 The very first opening lines of the book are about the scent of bitter almonds that remind Dr Urbino of the fate of unrequited love.<\/p>\n

Yet it would be a mistake to take the common view of M\u00e1rquez as primarily a glorious sensualist, \u2018the most evocative of writers\u2019 lauded by Penguin in their marketing, however sparkling the prose in one of Edith Grossman\u2019s best translations.\u00a0 For along with the heady floral notes, there is a base layer of mordant regret underpinning both this and his other novels.\u00a0 The smell of bitter almonds is that of cyanide, the recourse for frustrated lovers;\u00a0 the perfume of Fermina Diaz fades for Florentino even when he drinks a litre bottle of cologne in an attempt never to lose it.\u00a0 The infusions of linden blossoms that a doctor then prescribes for him are because the symptoms of extreme love, far from being romantic, are the same as those for cholera.\u00a0 And the cholera of the title is no evocation of a romantic Edwardian age:\u00a0 in M\u00e1rquez, characters live for love but also die out of neglect, loveless, and with all the symptoms of the virulent disease that has killed Dr Urbino\u2019s father and can rise up again from the pestilent city , however closely the aristocrats in their decaying palaces hold up perfumed handkerchiefs against it.<\/p>\n

The presiding impulse in M\u00e1rquez is that of loss, loss both of love but also time, which is why his greatest novels, like this and One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/em>, give themselves\u00a0 such long and winding timescales to unfold over: \u2018The very life of the colonial city, which the young Juvenal Urbino tended to idealise in his Parisian melancholy, was an illusion of memory.\u2019 M\u00e1rquez moves so restlessly backwards and forwards across the years during the telling of his story and his building up of the \u2018illusion of memory\u2019 that I defy any reader to collate a chronological ordering of events, let alone of Florentino\u2019s many loves and conquests as he tries to forget the smell of Fermina.\u00a0 No other novelist can make the reader feel that they are themselves continually forgetting what he has just told them.<\/p>\n

And along with loss comes anger \u2013 anger at what time does to the body, at what Colombia\u2019s perpetual civil war has done to the poor and the plantation workers, killed with a coup-de-grace to the head.\u00a0\u00a0 His romance is one of defiance, of love as something that stands against the tide of decay and death in a city rotting from the inside.\u00a0 The steam-boat journey that the finally reunited lovers make \u2013 when they can now smell the sour breath of old age on one another \u2013 is down a river denuded of trees, of people, of hope;\u00a0 they raise the yellow flag as if there were cholera on board, to isolate themselves from such a world.<\/p>\n

Of course we are now re-reading M\u00e1rquez in the light of his last novella, Memories of my Melancholy Whores<\/em>, which disconcerted many critics with its asperity and controversial theme \u2013 the prurient love of an old man for a very young girl.\u00a0 Those expecting \u2018Gabo\u2019, the old master in his eighties, to produce a mellow, sensual classic did not quite know what to make of a book that was more Lolita<\/em> than Old Man and the Sea<\/em>.\u00a0 But then perhaps they had not been reading the earlier novels carefully enough.<\/p>\n

\u00a0—————-<\/p>\n

You can listen to Hugh discuss M\u00e1rquez in the BBC’s A Good Read<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Re-reading M\u00e1rquez \u00a0 Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez, Love in the Time of Cholera Penguin New Edition, as part of a reissue of the complete set of his novels. No novelist since Proust has had a more acute sense of smell than M\u00e1rquez . Penguin should have reissued these books with sprayed strips of paper interspersed between […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":721,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"default","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-641","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/641"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=641"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3856,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/641\/revisions\/3856"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thewhiterock.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}