ah, i love the smell of MISOGENY in the morning
You guys. YOU GUYS. (I have got to stop beginning entries like this, you guys.) I am literally EXHAUSTED with HATRED after finishing Love in the Time of Cholera. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ladies and gentlemen. After years of dipping into the most salacious and borderline criminal pornography ever written - after braving Melvin Burgess not once, but twice - I've found someone who's outdone them all. I have never, ever, ever been so disgusted by a book as I was by this.
I started out assuming I'd just contract death by boredom. I went out of my way to avoid reading this book, because I have taken a vow to leave no book unfinished from now till ... a while from now. I read the newspaper, guys. And my rules of the road 2007 handbook. But I've handled boring books before (see: MIDDLEMARCH); and every second book I read demonstrates amazing aptitude for tell-not-show, although Marquez refines the talent to a dizzying level. He could have redeemed himself by showing more about the only interesting elements: Leona Cassiani or Fermina's marital problems (or some DIALOGUE, jesus), BUT NO. Did Ophrah Winfrey even READ this book to say she called it 'one of the greatest love stories ... so beautifully written'? 'All over the fucking place' is what I'd call it, plus, why no paragraph breaks, Marquez? Clearly my plebian little brain can't keep up. Except that it can. It was just ANNOYED by the POINTLESS RAMBLING STYLISTIC FLOURISHES that were about as USEFUL to the STORYLINE as TITS ON A BULL.
And then, and then, came the part about America Vicuna. When it was first mentioned I stopped and stared out the window and thought, "THAT IS FUCKING DISGUSTING." Then I got further along and actually yelled, "THAT IS FUCKING DISGUSTING!" Oh, god, and the housemaid.
There's an Eddie Izzard sketch about the way Hollywood rapes films - turning A Room with a View to A Room with a View of HELL. With men phoning their lovers and saying, "I love you, even though you fucked my wife" and marching off to be shot by aliens. While I certainly don't approve of this technique, in this case it would not only have been justified but practically REQUIRED that Fermina, instead of doing the inexplicable thing she did at the end, got a machete and cut off Florentino's dick with it and made him eat it until he DIED. CHOKING.
When I came to the end I was forced to shout a second time, with slightly different phraseology. (It was 'THIS WAS SO STUPID!') What a payoff. NOT.
Seriously, guys. Worst. Book. EVAR.
And after all fucking that, I still don't know where it's set.
I started out assuming I'd just contract death by boredom. I went out of my way to avoid reading this book, because I have taken a vow to leave no book unfinished from now till ... a while from now. I read the newspaper, guys. And my rules of the road 2007 handbook. But I've handled boring books before (see: MIDDLEMARCH); and every second book I read demonstrates amazing aptitude for tell-not-show, although Marquez refines the talent to a dizzying level. He could have redeemed himself by showing more about the only interesting elements: Leona Cassiani or Fermina's marital problems (or some DIALOGUE, jesus), BUT NO. Did Ophrah Winfrey even READ this book to say she called it 'one of the greatest love stories ... so beautifully written'? 'All over the fucking place' is what I'd call it, plus, why no paragraph breaks, Marquez? Clearly my plebian little brain can't keep up. Except that it can. It was just ANNOYED by the POINTLESS RAMBLING STYLISTIC FLOURISHES that were about as USEFUL to the STORYLINE as TITS ON A BULL.
And then, and then, came the part about America Vicuna. When it was first mentioned I stopped and stared out the window and thought, "THAT IS FUCKING DISGUSTING." Then I got further along and actually yelled, "THAT IS FUCKING DISGUSTING!" Oh, god, and the housemaid.
There's an Eddie Izzard sketch about the way Hollywood rapes films - turning A Room with a View to A Room with a View of HELL. With men phoning their lovers and saying, "I love you, even though you fucked my wife" and marching off to be shot by aliens. While I certainly don't approve of this technique, in this case it would not only have been justified but practically REQUIRED that Fermina, instead of doing the inexplicable thing she did at the end, got a machete and cut off Florentino's dick with it and made him eat it until he DIED. CHOKING.
When I came to the end I was forced to shout a second time, with slightly different phraseology. (It was 'THIS WAS SO STUPID!') What a payoff. NOT.
Seriously, guys. Worst. Book. EVAR.
And after all fucking that, I still don't know where it's set.