Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez

 

I spent years telling myself that I had outgrown Márquez and magical realism. Perhaps though I had only outgrown the latter and not the former. 

Love in the Time of Cholera was a truly surprisingly pleasant read, most likely because love (as a concept) is eternal and love stories are relatable. Love triangles are intriguing. And getting old is something that happens to everyone (and I love to describe myself as middle-aged despite the fact that I haven't yet turned 40). 

While some of the sappiest passages left me suitably untouched, I find it undeniable that a book essentially solely about people's relationships has got a timelessness to it that can make it appealing to a very wide audience. 

No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel García Márquez

Having been swept off of my feet after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude at age 16, almost immediately afterwards I jumped into No One Writes to the Colonel. Turns out, it was a rushed decision. Had I waited a little more, I probably would have enjoyed the book a lot more.

The sadness of the daily struggles of the colonel bored me when compared to the fascinating life of the other Colonel (with a capital C), Buendía. Yet, I now think that the book would have deserved something better than a couple of hours of distracted reading in my house’s “thinking room” (a room so tiny that one couldn’t do anything other than thinking – yet one with such a magnificent view over the Piedmontese hills and mountains that one just couldn’t turn it into a store room).

A friend of mine (probably too lazy to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but sufficiently smart to realize that reading was actually potentially cool)  kept on quoting the last line of the book and constantly praised the novel. I never thought the last line of No One Writes to the Colonel was particularly good or funny, but I now think that maybe the book does deserve more credit than what I initially gave it.

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez

I read this book when I was 16, on a school trip in which I was trying to get my mind off of the girl who was destroying my heart (or maybe I was doing it to prove to her how much of an intellectual I was – either way, it didn’t work).

To this day, there are still so many passages that I quote time and again: the discovery of ice, Remedios ascending to heaven, Mauricio Babilonia’s butterflies, the seventeen Aurelianos, everything around Melquiades, José Arcadio’s chestnut tree, and countless others.

And still this isn’t a book that I would like to re-read. I’m not sure if it’s just me or magical realism is generally out-grown by the time one turns 25. It’s one of my favourite books, yet I’m afraid that revisiting it might destroy my memories of it.