Come Read Love in the Time of Cholera With Me

As I have been slowly making my way through Love in the Time of Cholera over the past few weeks, two things have become apparent. First, my progress will be slow! As I stubbornly persist in reading the book in Spanish, I have to devote a considerable amount of time to looking up words, some of which are so specific to the context that I cannot always verify their meaning.

Also, it’s still the summer holidays, which means the kids are off school. Now, I don’t have any work commitments, so it would seem that I have plenty of time on my hands. However, that time comes with constant interruptions and an ongoing effort to pull the kids away from their screens. If you’re a parent, you know!

Second, following the main thread of the story is a struggle in itself. Márquez’s narrative style, with its constant flashbacks, backstories, and detailed descriptions of people, events and places, makes it difficult to follow the development of the main story. I feel like I’m back in my grandmother’s sitting room, listening to her meandering stories about her youth, digressing from story to story until she’d forget where she started. She would begin telling a story about her cousin who went to war, then veer off to a story about how she and the other women in her family were knitting him woollen socks, sitting around an oil lamp on winter evenings, tired from their daily chores. One of those chores would be preparing the lard for storage in the cellar for winter, and, “oh, how difficult it had been to catch the pig, which had gotten wind of what’s going to happen and was running amok and screaming in the back yard…. Wait, what was I talking about?”

So, keeping track of the main thread of the story among back stories and digressions is a skill that I had to develop since my first youth. In contrast to my dad’s stories, which felt like rehearsed recitations, with a distinct introduction, well organized arguments and strong conclusions (he was a language and literature teacher), my grandmother's narrative style was organic, fluid, relaxed and natural, but also chaotic! She also had a knack for dwelling on sordid details, which, to her, were simply a natural part of life growing up in the first few decades of the twentieth century. She had no qualms about discussing disgusting diseases in graphic detail, funeral rites for close relatives, body odours in a time when bathing was a luxury, and the hardships and losses of poverty and war, all against the backdrop of a patriarchal, conservative society where matches were arranged by drunk fathers and uncles in the village’s kafeneio, and love was never an easy affair.

These are the memories that surfaced when I started reading Love in the Time of Cholera, where death and decay permeate the story and frame every love affair. Indeed, if we trace all the stepping stones of the narrative in the first part, it becomes obvious that the relationship between love and cholera (both literally and as a metaphor of infection and decay) is very complex.

The story opens with death (a suicide to escape the suffering of old age), steps into a clandestine affair with a mulatto woman of the slave quarters, moves on to the anatomy of a 50-year-old marriage founded on routine and social convention, and lands on a love confession, also in the shadow of death, at the end of a funeral. And all this under the suffocating stench of the open sewers and the marshes, which hung over the city as a grim reminder of inevitable decay. I’ll get into the themes and contrasts later on, but for now here’s a passage that captures the novel’s constant movement between past and present, good and bad smells, slave quarters and the wealthy part of the city:

As they passed by the marshes, Dr. Urbino recognized their oppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases, which on so many insomniac dawns had risen to his bedroom, blending with the fragrance of jasmine from the patio, and which he felt pass by him like a wind out of yesterday that had nothing to do with his life. But that pestilence so frequently idealized by nostalgia became an unbearable reality when the carriage began to lurch through the quagmire of the streets where buzzards fought over the slaughterhouse offal as it was swept along by the receding tide.

Munch - Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones, Via Wikimedia commons. For me this image evokes the same emotions as the book - female loneliness, looking into the horizon while remaining trapped in a messy reality and the unsetling sense that a woman’s destiny is ultimately controlled by a man.

Why am I talking about my yaya Aristi in a discussion about a novel? In my many years of reading and studying, I have come to realize that it is inevitable to discover parts of ourselves in everything we read. Reading is not (and should not be) a rigid academic exercise, in which we must uncover an intrinsic meaning conveyed by the author or an “expert”. But unfortunately this is how most of us have been taught to approach literature. I still remember my surprise during my first year at university, when our Poetry professor asked us what we thought a poem was about (it was the Red Wheelbarrow). Most of us, fresh out of high school, where we were told exactly what to think, memorize it and then give the correct answer, stared at the professor, pens poised, ready to write down the correct interpretation. I think she was equally surprised that nobody raised their hand, insecure as we were in our lack of training to read critically.

So, what does it mean to “read critically”? For me it means to ask questions and not being satisfied with the obvious meaning of a text. It means to draw connections with other texts and with current events, to detect patterns, to examine the inner workings of a text, and to approach it with different lenses, which reveal different layers of interpretation.

Also, it means to accept that no writing is ever completely ideologically neutral: every text is produced by someone in a specific historical setting and a particular cultural context, using language that carries assumptions about gender, class, authority etc. We can discover these assumptions by asking questions, as for example:

• Whose perspective is privileged?

• Whose labor is invisible?

• Whose suffering matters?

• What patterns emerge and how do they contribute to the story?

• Who makes the decisions?Who speaks and who is silent?

My approach to reading texts, in the sense of interpreting them, is informed by feminist theory, structuralism, deconstruction and materialism. If you’ve never heard of these theories, do not worry, it is not important that you know what they are. What is important to know is that each of these approaches asks specific questions and enables different ways of reading a text. For example, feminist approaches focus on the representation of gender and power; structuralism examines the structures and oppositions that organize a text; deconstruction questions how the text creates, reinforces or undermines the binary oppositions it establishes; and materialist approaches focus on issues of class and economic relations.

“What does all that have to do with reading literature?” you may ask. I promise it does. As I explore Love in the Time of Cholera over the next few weeks, I will show you how you can love a book and appreciate its ideological complexities at the same time. We will ask questions that will illuminate aspects of the text you may not have noticed before. We will question its assumptions about love and its relationship to old age and decay. We will analyze the representation of the female characters and the degree of agency they are allowed in their society.

And all that, plus any other questions that emerge along the way!

If this sound like the kind of reading you’d like to do, come along! Over the next few weeks, we’ll slow down, ask questions, follow the patterns, and see what else is hiding in the pages of Love in the Time of Cholera.

Happy readings!