Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

As part of my preparation for my next book, I’m reading and analyzing authors who exhibit a particular style. So far, it’s been Alice Hoffmann and Julio Cortazar. Now, it’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The book I chose was Love in the Time of Cholera, and several things immediately set it apart from other books I’ve read in recent years. 

First, Marquez does not write for us (Americans). He writes for his own countrymen. How do I know this? Because nowhere in this novel…nowhere…does he mention the name of the country in which it is set. He only mentions the name of the city in which the main action takes place a couple of times. He mentions the Caribbean several times, the Antilles in early chapters, but for us geography-challenged Americans, the only clues Marquez provides us are the names of the Magdalena River and the city of Barranquilla. He writes for people who know these things, for whom those words evoke an immediate knowledge. Marquez is from Columbia, and he writes for Colombians. This in itself was refreshing, as throughout the book he writes of “we,” meaning Columbian, and refers to “our history.” This is an authentic voice of a nation I knew little about.

Second, the narrative is in third-person omniscient, a voice that has been out of style since the mid-20th century. Modern books favor third-person limited and the first-person narrative styles almost exclusively, and though some authors dip into third-person omniscience here and there, rarely do we find an entire novel told in this Old World style. And yet, this is a purposeful and a meaningful choice Marquez has made. The omniscient viewpoint, so popular in earlier centuries, evokes just that 19th century atmosphere in which the novel’s main action takes place. This fin de siècle voice reinforces the temporal setting, as the world and the characters within it move–willingly or not–from the 19th into the 20th century.

Marquez employs another technique, gleaned from centuries past: limited dialogue. Pages and pages will go by in which, though people speak to one another, there is no quoted dialogue. In fact, almost all of the dialogue is indirect (i.e., He told her that he did not care for the soup.) This does two things. Primarily, it keeps us rooted to the narrative voice, leaving us undisturbed as the storyteller weaves his tale, but also, it makes what direct dialogue there is all that more important. Marquez will relate to us a long, winding story about an argument between husband and wife, all without a single quoted word; the story will go on for pages (all delightful) until, at the very end, the author will give us a line of quoted dialogue to cap the story.

As with the other works I’ve read in this analysis phase, Marquez fills his book with backstory. Every person, every place, every street and house, every thing inside each house, they all have a history and that history affects the story. It isn’t just history that we learn as history; it’s history that makes the story what it is. The parrot that Dr. Juvenal Urbino teaches Latin is not just a parrot; it is the parrot his wife purchased at the end of a long line of previous pet purchases, a habit begun in reaction to an earlier history, which itself was a reaction to an even earlier history.

Marquez is also completely unconstrained by the strictures of chronology. The story begins at the end, goes back to the beginning, meanders around the middle (with side trips in both directions), then creates a new beginning and travels along to the end again. It is a totally timeless chronology, and Marquez is unafraid to move backward or forward in time, even in the same scene. Paragraphs will switch ten years in time and move from one character to the next with a facility that makes it nearly impossible to detect where the shift took place.

The story is not tragic, but tragedy appears, as it will in life, surrounded by joy and love and anger and fear. Love in the Time of Cholera is, in its essence, a dissertation on love in all its many forms, and while our main characters are as flawed as any of us, and probably more so, they are still engaging, fascinating, and ultimately deserving of happiness. This book is a Must Read for writers who want to see the art of building history at its finest.

k