Marquez and Memory

When I read this morning that today is the birthday of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, born in 1927 and still living, I thought of his best book. Not 100 Years of Solitude, which took me almost 100 years to read (though I did eventually finish it). But Love in the Time of Cholera.

It has been several years since I read this novel, but I still remember the transcendent last chapter, when the beautiful but aged Fermina and Florentino, the man who has waited 50 years to be with her, take a steamboat voyage down a river bloated with corpses.

Love triumphs over death is the theme, but I can remember little else of that last chapter, only that I held my breath from the beauty of the language and the depth of the thoughts. This morning I've looked for quotations that might give a hint of this book's grandeur and I found this one by Florentino: "Love becomes nobler and greater in calamity."

But I'll leave the last words to Thomas Pynchon and a review of the book he wrote for the New York Times in April, 1988:

There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime's experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance -- at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs Love in the Time of Cholera, this shining and heartbreaking novel.