Five years ago I pulled a book off a shelf in the sitting room of a volunteer home in Costa Rica. Over the course of my two week stay, I read Love in the Time of Cholera.His work is beautiful and tragic. It is heart-stopping in both depth and beauty.
Perhaps it was the Latin American environment I read it in and my nostalgic way of being, but this book struck me as unlike anything I had ever read before.
When I read last month that he had passed away, I felt the urge to revisit his stories. A pile of books later, I am starting on my mission...novels, short stories, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin. A Colombian man with a close friendship to Cuba's Fidel Castro, a Nobel Laureate, a writer with a combination of realism and imagination, I'm not sure how he doesn't make for an interesting read.
Love in the Time of Cholera tells the story of a lifetime between a man and his wife, beginning at the end and working its way back to the start. It is the story of a distinguished Doctor, still practicing in his 80's, and his companionship with a wife over the course of several decades; of trials and triumphs, opportunities and wrong turns....
“He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you”
One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of an isolated community with little contact to the outside world. It is a story that highlights the course of this community and its family's leadership throughout a century.
"Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction."
His language is thick and rich. It is a poetic, beautiful prose that is becomes all-consuming endeavor to work your way through.
I would recommend his books to anyone with an interest in Latin American culture and any person who shares a deep love for language and for epic storytelling.
Check back as I make my way through this stories and life, in the memory of an incredible human being.
