An unforeseen set of circumstances, roughly along the lines of a lot of people, myself included, being unable to make it, meant that my book club meeting this month was postponed by a week. This was fortunate, as it gave me chance to finish reading the book, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. That said, I knew I wasn't going to be able to make it anyway, so was under no great pressure to do so, nor to force myself to pick it up and get on with.
Which was one of things about it – it wasn't something I had to force myself to pick up and read, but neither was it something I was desperate to get back to. Indeed, I'm struggling to find anything to say about it really – like last night's footprints covered by this morning's snow, it's hard to tell that it was ever really there. It just didn't have an impact on me or leave much of a trace, which I suppose is damning with faint praise.
It was well written, wich a nice flowing style, but it generally took me a while to get into each time I picked it up, possibly due to a lack of real narrative drive. This isn't necessarily a problem, I'm usualyy quite happy for rambling anecdotes and observations, I don't need hardcore action and plot twists every page, but thinking about it, here it was perhaps made the book feel so strangely lightweight. Yet, it wasn't difficult or a chore to read once I did get into it and I did read decent chunks at a time. Similarly, I have largely no feelings for the characters – they kind of left me cold and I wasn't interested in them. I thought Juvenal was quite a nice chap, Florentino was an idiot and Fermina was utterly nondescript. Indeed, so little impression did they have on me, I found it hard to remember at times who was who. And that's about it. It wasn't a bad book by any means, but neither did I really think it was much good.
I'm struggling to find anything much to say here now, never mind for an hour-long discussion. I had pretty high hopes and had heard pretty good things, I guess I was expecting something like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which is superb. I didn't get that. Love is wonderful and painful and confusing and right and wrong and deep and mysterious and passionate and platonic and all kinds of other things, at least so I thought. But if this is love in all it's forms – a bit flat, oddly devoid of passion, lacking in feeling – I'll pass, thanks.
Book number: 69
Title: Love in the Time of Cholera
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Category: Book club/recommendations
No comments:
Post a Comment