Currently Reading: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the two most well-known books by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and one of the most beloved books of literature in all the world. This Nobel Prize-winning novelist's prose sings. He is a reason for the popularization of the gorgeous literary style of magical realism. The other novel for which he is so well-known is One Hundred Years of Solitude. That book may be my favorite of all-time, sitting close to Milan Kundera's Immortality and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (let's stick George Orwell's 1984 in there while we're at it). I just wanted to share a clump of prose from the early pages of the book that I thought were beautiful and important, as well as indicative of Marquez' prose.

"Along the rough cobbled streets that had served so well in surprise attacks and buccaneer landings, weeds hung from the balconies and opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions, and the only signs of life at two o'clock in the afternoon were languid piano exercises played in the dim light of siesta. Indoors, in the cool bedrooms saturated with incense, women protected themselves from the sun as if it were a shameful infection, and even at early Mass they hid their faces in their mantillas. Their love affairs were slow and difficult and were often disturbed by sinister omens, and life seemed interminable. At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one's soul"

It is also important to note that this English translation of this Spanish text is made possible by the ever-important translator of Latin American literature, Edith Grossman. Also, this is a mantilla.