Book Review: No one's perfect. Not the author, and certainly not me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a genius, the inventor of magical realism in which magic is just another part of reality, and there's no difference between the two for the author or the characters in his books. He's one of my top three all-time favorite authors, but somehow I wished that Love in the Time of Cholera was just half as long. What happened? Can there be too much brilliance? The characters received deep description and examination, vivid lives occurred, magic seeped in at the edges. In every paragraph I could see what a brilliant writer Marquez was, but maybe there were just too many paragraphs. The book seemed to drag, to be unnecessarily stretched out. I was ready for it to be over long before the end. Maybe Marquez was trying to show how long Florentino Ariza waited, how long 50 years can be. I feel incredibly disloyal, and I'd love to blame the translator (Edith Grossman), since she wasn't the ever-reliable Gregory Rabassa who translated so many of the other books. But I don't think it was the translation, which seemed serviceable. Was Gabriel Garcia Marquez running out of steam, or was it just me? Although there are moments in the book that made me squirm (the unrequited lover is no saint), it wasn't the plot or any one thing in particular. Maybe Love in the Time of Cholera should have been a novella, a form in which Marquez has excelled. A mere 200 pages would have been fine. This is not to say that there isn't beautiful Marquezian writing throughout -- I'd chop off my hand to be able to write like him (I can type one-handed). But for me, even an endless supply of beautiful writing didn't work. I felt it was like a bad date with someone you love: you still love the person, but you're really ready to do something else already. I still love Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I'm kind of fond of Love in the Time of Cholera, but I'm ready to read something else. The title is kind of brilliant, tho. [3.5 Stars]
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