"The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast."
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1985.

I never did finish reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude". The only thing of his that I managed to finish is "No One Writes to the Colonel and other stories". You need a bright quiet place to read a Garcia Marquez. It requires a certain amount of focus, a great desire to know what happens next. It's not something you can skim through while waiting for the bus.

I don't know how he does it, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes the perfect prose all the time. Everytime I read him I think of ways to steal his phrases without actually rewriting his exact words. It never works, of course. He writes about sad lives, full of regret and memories of how things were in the past, how things are difficult now in the present. It's like Russian literature with more sun. Only not as depressing. Sometimes.

"Love in the Time of Cholera" is a good book for the Garcia Marquez virgin. It's not as convoluted as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and has a lot less magic and the spiritual fantastic. The narrative flow is a bit jumpy, but the story and its images are worth the effort of figuring "who is he talking about again?"

Essentially, it's a love triangle. It's a decades-long obsession, a man with a singular purpose in life: to get the woman he loves, eventhough she's already married to someone else. And it's a minute study of love in all the various forms it takes and the stages people go through to get love; the stalking, the wooing, the secret letters, the formal visits, the marriage, the sex, the life after marriage, the life after love's death, the love reborn. He tells us love is not just for the young. Or the married.

It's also a glorious painting of 18th Century Carribeans, the decay of old towns, the carriage rides, the what now seems to be antiquated rituals of having your portrait taken, of listening to an orchestra, of writing love-letters.

It's achingly brilliant, you want to be in love like the characters are in love. I'm not talking soppy, trashy-novel kind of love here. It's not "When I first saw you, I knew you were the one for me" kind of thing. It's a lot more than that. It's flawed, it's broken, it's the rejection and reception of love, for different reasons sometimes unexplained. It's perhaps an accurate depiction of men and women making that decision to fall in love with someone, to accept them, to understand them, to betray them, to forgive them, to mourn them. It's all of that. Presented to you beautifully in words I think only he is capable of.

Everytime I watch "Roman Holiday" I wish the ending was different. I wanted the story to go on. I felt the same for this book. I was reading the last chapter, the last pages of the book, without even realizing that it was the end. You could say the book ends with a beginning. It ends with that same thing we all cling to when we love. It ends with hope.