Love in the Time of Cholera

This is a book I had wanted to read for a long time, without knowing anything about it. I just knew it was one of the classics and that was reason enough for me to want to read it.

A few years back, someone I knew heard I wanted to read it, and offered it from their own collection. The offer was prefaced with, ‘don’t buy it. I have it, take it from me. You may like it, I don’t know, but I didn’t. It doesn’t make much sense’ or something similar.

I finally didn’t take up the offer, and the book went somewhere to the back of my mind. Sometime last year, I was bored, bookless, and looked up books online. One of the first ones I stumbled across was an ecopy of ‘love in the time of cholera’. I downloaded it, read a few pages, read the blurbs about it. It didn’t seem that fascinating so unread it remained. Then recently, while waiting to catch up with someone, I decided to browse a bookshop nearby. There, on top of one of the book stacks, was a copy of this book. I picked it up and bought it, reasoning that it deserved another chance; since there have been only a few books that I have started but not completed reading. After that, it languished on my book stack for a long while ‘coz the initial pages seemed desultory and rambling and the writing prosy. Taken up, kept down, forgotten, this book seemed destined to be an addition to my never-completed list.

After that, I do not know what changed, but the next time I picked it up again, I realized within a few pages that this time it would not remain unread. I picked it up whenever I could, pored over a page or two. The language which seemed prosy earlier now seemed rich and  redolent of the colours of the region the book is based in (which incidentally I could not figure out at all, it was just not Spain was all I could get).

The book is as meandering as the river it is based on, but just as true to its course. It starts off from uncertain and unrelated sources and seems to wander over a vast plain and get lost occasionally. This will not appeal to you, if you like your books and stories to make sense, or to be fast paced, or to be leading somewhere. This book will not lead you anywhere concrete, but the reading of it, the journey covered while meandering is enriching. It does not attempt to justify its protagonists, in fact, you will be hard put to tell who the protagonists are. Is it the stern but social and popular Dr Urbino, or the morally weak but emotionally true to his love Florentino, or the undecipherable and seemingly selfish Fermina? It does not attempt to include plot sequences or racy scenes into its narrative. At no point will you feel your heart racing for the characters, nor will you feel impatience to know what happens next for the characters. It all unfolds slowly, maybe, sometimes even sluggishly.

One of the blurbs on the back of the book reads ‘An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women’. I will not be able to describe this book any better. This book won’t take you places, nor will it open your mind to vistas unknown. However, the reading of it might open your thinking up to human emotions and their frailty, their intangible but solid presence, to the interaction between people, to the conventions of society which are unchanging even though the book is set in a time and place distant from now.

I am glad I didn’t borrow this book from someone, it’s most certainly a keeper. Having read and fallen in love with its English translation, I am sure the original Spanish version will be much more rich, much more exquisite to read. Time to pick up my Spanish lessons again, if for no other reason than to read this book in its original avatar.

To leave you with the last line –

Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.

“Forever,” he said.

Fly me away / Fly me home*

Daily prompt:  Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.

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A 22 year old who had never before travelled long distance without her family, stepped on to foreign soil. She parted company with her travelling colleagues – they had made the international flight together and bonded despite just having met at the departing airport; bonded in the way only those can who know they are about to spend the next 22 odd hours travelling and that to do so without any company at all would be utterly lonely. Now their ways separated, each on to his or her own domestic leg of the journey, some to the hinterland in a straight flight, some via a hop to another city. She had a hop, and a skip as well. Two breaks before she reached a city that was to house her for the next 2 months. Home was behind, what was ahead was a new place, both exciting in its possibilities and terrifying in its unknownness.

She bid farewell to her fellow travellers, saw them off on their flights and waited for her connection. Sitting, observing, seeing fellow travellers, fellow countrymen, foreigners; nay they were the localites now and she was the foreigner. And then she boarded her flight, and realized that it contained not one of her numerous,omnipresent countrymen. All around her were  white/pink faces, the loud tones and cadences of Americans, the accents totally strange to her, the flight announcements in an English almost undecipherable. And she suddenly realised exactly how far she had travelled from home, how far she had left everything familiar, how unknown to her all these people were.

Since then she has visited a few more countries, a few more places, with or without friends and family, but has never felt as far from home as she did on that very first flight alone.

* The airlines she flew on on that trip had baggage tags which said ‘Fly me away’ or ‘Fly me home’. Hers said ‘Fly me away’.

How is the new so

Another DP challenge:

Click over to your favorite blog, and pick out the 4th and 14th words (that aren’t “the” or “an”). Drop them into this phrase:

“_____ is the new _____.”

There’s your post title. Now write!

I had http://anonandon.wordpress.com/2013/10/10/hair-play/  open, and I picked up ‘How’ and ‘so’. So the post’s new working title was ‘How is the new so’. Which doesn’t make a lot of sense.  So in an attempt to inject some sense, I came up with the following post.

____________________________________________________________________________________

“How is the new so-fa?”

“Deep”

“Deep like the sea?”

“Deeper. It’s a black hole, only very visible. Keep things at your own risk. They go in, and never come out. Only yesterday we lost the TV remote, Sue’s tiny clutch doll, Miriam’s penny purse and Jake’s plastic horse figure. And that was its 2nd day in the house.”

“Hahahaha. Well, what happened next?”

“You can’t imagine. Miriam started bawling because her pennies were in the purse. Jake acted all heroic and jumped up on the sofa to punch it and make it return his horse. He also told Miriam not to worry and he would tell his horse to pick up the purse on its way out.”

“And Sue?”

“And Sue being ever practical, watched her siblings and lay down on the sofa. And before we realized it, she fed her arm to the sofa, right upto the shoulder. And then came out clutching her doll, hair mussed up for being in such an adventure.”

“Sure is an adventure. What happened to the TV remote? Did she get that too?”

“No, we told her to leave it in. Now whoever cries about not getting to watch their favourite show gets to walk down to the TV and switch the channels.”

G.R.A.V.I.T.Y.

Someone might write, or may have already written, why this is THE must watch movie for this year, so what the heck, here’s my own compilation of ten unbeatable reasons you should watch Gravity and be awed by it. You don’t find me glorifying a movie, any movie, too often so when I do, you better sit up and take notice.

1) The 3D visuals. There’s a reason they are top of the list.
2) The tight editing. There are promising movies that somehow go overboard. And others which are tightly reined in, keeping you on the edge of your seat, hand to your sliently ‘O’ed mouth.
3) Sunrise over the earth. And countless other shots of Earth seen directly, indrectly, in visor reflections, through port holes, you name it. The blackness of space. The silence. The gravity and lack of it. The constellations. The ‘night’ sky. Essentially, all things space-y.
4) Matt Kowalsky’s sense of humour. Whoever dreamt up that guy and gave him dialogues and breathed life into his character deserves nothing less than an Oscar. Make that 10 oscars. Goerge Clooney might have been wasted in that role, but hey, you can’t imagine anyone else doing that role with such panache either.
5) Sandra Bullock. And her awesomely fit body. The guys can go drool over her and we women can all sigh and hope to attain that perfection. What. a. body. Although, too bad Clooney didn’t get to show off any.
6) When Sandra B gets cut adrift. When George C gets cut adrift. When things don’t get cut adrift.
7) How much you root for Dr. Ryan Stone to get back and get out alive, until the very very end.
8) Sharrif going very very briefly “Mera joota hai japani”. Genius touch, though invisible and unapparent to the non Indians out there.
9) The fire extinguisher scene. It is just genius the way the extinguisher is used, and you totally don’t see it coming. If I told you more I’d have to erase your memory and that would make this list totally pointless, wouldn’t it?
10) The visuals. Unless you are a multi gazillionaire, this is the closest you will come to getting into space.

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7s and 8s

We are growing up now. The blog has embarked on its 8th year.

No profound words of wisdom here, just a little wish and hope that I continue to find the necessary impetus to write. And that readers continue to visit. And that they bring other visitors with them. And I might as well throw in a wish for world peace.

Some of the above things may actually be possible, you know. 😉