I also forgot my feelings on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "
Love in the Time of Cholera"! Maybe it is my T or the fact that I had an obsessive ex fiancee but this book didn't strike me as romantic at all. It gave me the sick feeling of this poor woman being stalked for a lifetime - creepy - made my skin crawl!!
I read the whole thing, but I have no idea why I put up with it for so long, it was an awful book, one of the worst I've read. Perhaps I was hoping it would resolve itself into something less sordid than glorifying this remarkably self-absorbed, unimpressive, slightly sinister man's boring lifelong obsession with a remarkably vacuous and equally self absobed woman. But instead we ended up with our already deeply tiresome elderly "hero" making a disturbing digression into paedophilia with a young girl he was supposed to be the guardian of. It seemed to serve no purpose other than to prove he was still "up to it", and in posession of whatever mystifiying attraction to the opposite sex he had been imbued with. Perhaps we were supposed to be impressed that he still wanted a woman in her seventies, like himself, when he could have the willing and barely pubescent girl he was keeping at home. I, however, was far from impressed.
Worse, the writer appeared to be determinedly making a weak and psychologically unconvincing justification for the paedophilic episode
as an equal relationship. I haven't seen this too often from mainstream novelists, and wasn't particularly enthused by seeing it here. Then he remembered the story was supposed to be about the revolting man whose life history he had been following and his obession with a woman his own age, and therefore killed the girl off.
The hero, as though to set the seal on his essential worthlessness, and lack of depth or conscience, in case we still needed convincing of it at this point, shows no real remorse for her death and the part he played in it. Instead he gets it on with the vacuous woman, now conveniently a widow, who we are supposed to be impressed with him having obsessively waited his entire adult life for her to be freed of her husband, so that he could have her; while screwing around with most of the willing female population of Columbia in the meantime, naturally. The only thing I wanted at this stage was for his manhood to prove not up to the task, or maybe suffer a nasty accident, which would have been poetic justice after what I'd had to put up with for 200 and whatever pages up until this point. Naturally it didn't happen, so the book remains unredeemed, and irredeemable... :rolli: