Word: garcias
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Because of the time warp of translation, it took three years for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Cien Anos de Soledad to reach and astound the English- speaking world as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970). That rousing chronicle of a mythical South American town and a family doomed to heroism and folly established its author's international reputation. Among the book's magical properties was the power to transform a once obscure Colombian journalist into the recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. Garcia Marquez, of course, published other works along the way to Stockholm, including three novels...
Perhaps countless readers' hopes for another Solitude have been misguided. Rumors have been building, though, of something big in progress. Another long, ambitious Garcia Marquez novel has been wending its way toward English translation, accumulating impressive numbers in the process: sales of more than 1 million in the original Spanish version, hundreds of thousands of copies snapped up in West Germany, Italy and France. The U.S. debut of Love in the Time of Cholera comes preceded by considerable thunder...
...noise is justified. This book will not make anyone forget One Hundred Years of Solitude, and thank goodness for that. Instead, Garcia Marquez, 60, * offers a spacious mirror image of the novel that made him famous. This time out, surface events largely conform to the dictates of plausibility. No one ascends bodily into heaven; the famous plague of insomnia that swept through Solitude here becomes literal, recurrent ravages of cholera morbus. The bizarre and outlandish are relegated to the domain of private lives, to characters who must construct for themselves elaborate fictions to follow in order to stand the shocks...
This contretemps calls for a bit of explaining, and Garcia Marquez flashes backward to tell all. A half-century of solitude earlier, Florentino enjoys a passionate, three-year romance with the schoolgirl Fermina, conducted entirely through the exchange of clandestine letters. His swooning preoccupation and physical distress arouse concern: "His mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera." But it is love, all right, and Florentino's symptoms grow worse when Fermina abruptly tosses him aside and later weds Dr. Urbino, the scion of an illustrious though fading...
Will Florentino and Fermina find happiness at the long, bitter end? Garcia Marquez answers this question eventually, but the success of his novel does not depend on the outcome. The genius of Love in the Time of Cholera is the filling-in of the gaps of ordinary life, the munificence of detail that can be exacted from a place where, as Dr. Urbino muses, "nothing had happened for four centuries." Nonetheless, the torpid scenery provides a beguiling background, "the broken roofs and the decaying walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles, the trail of islands...