Craig's Blog of Destiny

You know how sometimes when you’re reading something the sentence just seems to go on and on, telling of things that happened, then morphing into background discussion, possibly even getting into some conversation before going back to event depiction, all the while just going, and going and you never seem to even have a hint that the sentence will end, let alone see an end coming, or if you do think that this may be the point that the sentence will end, it doesn’t; it just keeps going and going, like that battery powered rabbit that never stops beating that drum, the sentence seems to exist without an end, as if it in and of itself is the very definition of forever, or of eternal and that this sentence will be going on and on through the end of time, just keep running and running and running like that damn rabbit…..?

So it is with the latest book I’ve read, “Love in the Time of Cholera.”  Not that the sentences go on forever, but everything else does.  This is a book of run on paragraphs that turn into run on chapters that just seem to go on and on without end.  I can’t think of a more apt description of this work than that it is a “run on” book.   While I found the characters compelling and the story interesting (I’ll want to see the movie), it was just difficult to read.

Here I’ll adopt my Jerry Seinfeld voice: what’s with the use of everyone’s full name – first and last names – throughout the book.  There are three main characters, and never are they referred to as Florentino, or Fermina, or Juvenal.  It always “Florentino Ariza did such…” and “Fermina Daza said …” and “Dr Juvenal Urbino fell off the ladder…”  After I’ve gotten to know Florentino about as well as I could, the last line of the book begins with “Florentino Ariza had kept…”  We certainly should have been on a first name basis by then.  That relentless use of the full names made me feel like the author had a class assignment to do a work of so many words and he needed to pad it to get there.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  I don’t know why.  It may be that it’s just too much of an artistic work, or too scholarly, for my tastes, but reading it was just a challenge.