So much to enjoy in Love in the Time of Cholera, but one warning

 So much to like in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great novel Love in the Time of Cholera (1985, tr. 1988) - and, for those overwhelmed by Covid-19 panic, the novel has little or nothing to do w/ the cholera epidemic so don't let that put you off - right on through to the final section in which at last Florentino's 50+-year obsession has finally given him the chance to woo and win the now-widowed (as we saw in the first chapter) Fermina. GGM does a terrific job, maybe the best ever, in depicting the sexual relationship in an elderly couple - the courtship w/ its shame and embarrassment, its physical difficulties, its satisfaction in quiet, intimate moments of peace. The final section encompasses a voyage up the Magdalena River, during which Florentino wins her love after years of indifference and even hostility - and the voyage recapitulates a similar journey that Florentino took in his youth, to get away from his heartsick troubles - and in this journey he sees, and we see, how the landscape of this Caribbean country (Colombia, obvious) has been ruined by logging - unexpectedly, this novel has become a dystopian novel of ecological disaster, way ahead of its time. If you, like me, mark in your reading material passages of exceptional beauty, insight, and detail, you'll end up w/ markings on every page - and I can't say that about any other 20th-century writer other than Proust. I do, however, have to reiterate my only quibble with the otherwise great novel about love and the pursuit of happiness, and that's Florentino's sexual relationship w/ the teenage girl (named America, for whatever that's worth) whose family had entrusted her to him to protect her as her guardian when she was a student near his home; there's no excusing his horrible and criminal behavior to this girl (not a woman, thank you) she 50 years his junior - and in fact in the final chapter Florentino learns that, in his absence on the river voyage, America killed herself - and that ends that, w/ hardly a moment of remorse and none of guilt. Sure, a lot of fiction in the 20th century was way off base regarding the treatment of women, but aside from Lolita no other significant novel that I can think of included and seemingly condoned such criminal behavior. Sorry to end on that note, as there's so much else to enjoy in this novel; caveat emptor. 

Lorrie Moore may be the best short-story writer around

 Lorrie Moore has been one of my favorite short-story writers, maybe (along w/ Saunders) the best around w/ the death or retirement of so many greats in the past few years (Munro, Trevor, Roth, Updike et al.), especially noted for her mordant sense of humor and her ingenious admixtures of comedy and tragedy. She seems to have been on something of a hiatus, however, over the past decade - or maybe it's just me not paying attention? - but with the recent publication of her Collected Stories, an act of anointment if ever there was one, she has emerged w/ a few appearances in the NYer and elsewhere. Great! Her story in the current NYer, Face Time, if frighteningly au courant and it touches on an experience that almost all of us have faced, are facing, or will face: an elderly relative (father, in this case) in hospital care in final stages of succumbing to Covid19. Moore with great sensitivity builds a witty and caring relationship between father and daughter (the daughter seeming somewhat like Moore, though this is clearly not a piece of autofiction or memoir) and she also sketches in relationships w/ care-givers (strained) and with siblings (more so), and all done through the medium of FaceTime - all told, quite an accomplishment, Yes, it's a little scary to read this - though much less than with what's probably LM's most famous story, People Like Us ... (about a young couple whose infant daughter is diagnosed w/ kidney cancer) - though both stories have that sense of wit and dedication guiding us, or the protagonists I should say, through medical trauma. FaceTime isn't as "funny" as some of Moore's earlier work, but it's more mature, complex, and wise -whereas her earlier works focused on a  protagonist who was insecure, at loose ends, and at times acerbic. Worth reading this one - and it may drive me toward buying a copy of her Collected Stories (is reading through that collection something like reading an autobiography in installments?, just wondering). 

Did Gabriel Garcia Marquez lost his moral compass?

 For all the strengths of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera - evocation of time and place, clearly developed and distinct characters, an assured authorial narrative voice, vivid topical and psychological portraiture, a range of esoteric but lightly worn knowledge and information - toward the end of the novel there's a plot development that can only leaving me aghast and wondering: Has Garcia Marquez lost his moral compass? Up till now - 250 or so pp into this ca 350-page novel - GGM has made his central character, Florentino Araz, entirely sympathetic, a hero for whom we feel both sorrow and pity. He has vowed to devote his entire life to winning back the love of the woman who was his first love and who spurned him in an unexplained and sudden reversal of her affections. We follow FA over the course of his long bachelorhood - a life that was by no means celibate. In fact, one of the many strengths of this novel has been GGM's success at realistic but not prurient depiction of sex, and in particular his sensitivity toward women characters in general and FA's partners in particular; GGM makes clear that his love interests were usually widows and they, like him, wanted fulfilling sexual relationships but had no interest in marriage or long-term affection; everybody was happy, no one exploited. And then, as we near the climactic and long-awaited scene (which GGM provides in the first chapter and jumps back about 50 years and gives us the whole background of Florentino's pursuit of Fermia) in which Fermia is widowed, Florentino is deeply involved in a relationship w/ a 14-year-old girl who was entrusted to him as her guardian while she was enrolled in a convent high school. For all GGM's attempts to make her sympathetic and to depict this as a mutually healthy sexual relationship, it is impossible for me and I would hope for most readers to see this relationship as perverse, exploitative, and in our culture today criminal - and suddenly I find myself hating Florentino and wondering about GGM himself if he can really imagine this relationship as anything other than exploitation - and don't talk to me about Lolita, another perverse novel unaccountably adored by so many critics - and speaking of critics how many mentioned this exploitative relationship in their review of this novel back in the 80s? (And I include myself here; I know I reviewed it but have no idea if I registered any outrage at this Florentino's behavior). So mea culpa if so, and in either event how could we all let GGM off so lightly on this matter? It's still a great book in many ways, a classic even, but there's some rot at the heart of the matter. 

Is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel a work of "magic realism"?

 For some reason - most likely the extreme success and accomplishment of his most famous novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez is considered to be a founder of the Latin American literary movement Magic Realism; that tag makes sense at least for that novel, which includes such tropes as a young man always seen among a cloud of butterflies (wish I could summon up more examples). These episodes and touches occur within a literary style that is replete w/ realistic topical detail and is never dependent on the "magic" to drive the plot forward (no supernatural characters, for ex.) so that the strange moments when they occur feel to the reader to be part of the realistic re-creation of a specific time and locale. Right now I'm reading GGM's later novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, which with 100 Years stands as the pinnacle of his achievement - and I'm noting in reading it (now about 3/4 through the novel) that nothing in this novel (so far anyway) speaks to the "magic"; on the contrary, it's a fully realized "realistic" setting - an unnamed Caribbean country (obviously based on GGM's native Colombia) in the early years of the 20th century. There is nothing supernatural in the novel - but it's not an example of "naturalism" such as, say Mme Bovary, in that the emotions and actions of the characters are always extreme and eccentric. The novel centers on 3 characters (whose names are distressingly similar): Fermia Daza, Umberto Juvenal, and Florentino Ariza. When Florentino was a young many he fell in love w/ the inaccessible beauty Fermia and courted her surreptitiously and remotely over many years; at last she won her father's approval but suddenly and inexplicably cut off her non-relationship w/ Florentino and married the young physician Umberto. Florentino vows to love her (albeit from afar)all his life - and the novel begins when Umberto dies and Florentino speaks to Fermia for the first time in 50 years (!) and declares his undying love for her. Most of the novel shows the eccentric and exaggerated sexual pursuits of Florentino in his bachelorhood (not quite realistic, in my view, but not "magic" or supernatural) - and toward the end, the part of reading now, we learn of Umberto's infidelity and it's near ruinous effect on the marriage (a rift later healed, at least to a degree). The "love" noted in the title applies to several of the characters, as their half-century romantic obsessions play out against the background of country spinning into despair because of the epidemic and the many civil wars. 

The challenge and the beauty of Love in the Time of Cholera

 When I reviewed Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera back in the 1980s I remarked that it would be one of the few novels of its time that were to be read and re-read in future generations - and that's certainly the case. GGM's reputation and popularity remain extraordinarily high even 40 or so years later - and Love ... Cholera (despite its use as a plot prop in a crappy romcom film in the 90s) stands alongside Hundred Years of Solitude as his twin peaks of excellence. Love/Cholera is far less historical/political that Solitude; it's more of a love story than the turbulent history of a time and place - imagined, but clearly built on GGM's native Colombia. Both novels are built upon a superabundance of absorbed details; probably no other writer of literary fiction had such a cinematic style as GGM; he fully realizes every moment, every scene, every character down to the last and finest detail - all while keeping the plot rushing along (no Proustian languers; rather, a richness of observation that verges at times on the comic). I'm about 1/4 of the way into the novel, which GGM composed in a series of long (50 pp or so) unnumbered sections - all of which are takes on undying love and on sudden decisions or actions that alter the course of one's entire life. There's high drama throughout, vivid characterization, some vastly and often dark comic scenes (the death of a character trying to retrieve a foul-mouthed parrot from its perch in a tree) and of course the re-creation of a time and place, early 20th century in a small city on the Caribbean coast of South America (Colombia, obviously). It can be a demanding novel - sometimes hard to remember characters' names, which in GGM's world are sometimes infuriatingly similar to one another, but worth staying with for the long run, as the novel is absorbing and in a style unique to this one great writer. 

A novel about species extinction that doesn't really come through

Not a lot to say about Charlotte McConaghy's novel Migrations (2020), which I probably won't finish reading, other than that it's highly ambitious and from what I've read, about 25% of the book, beyond the reach of the writer. The bold ambition: we're in a future world in which many species of animal have vanished and the oceans are so depleted that fishing is outlawed. The narrator and central character is studying one of the few surviving bird species, the Arctic tern, and wrangles a passage from Greenland on one of the few operating fishing boats - and talks the captain into extending the voyage from pole to pole to trace the flight a few tagged terns. The obvious antecedent is Moby-Dick, but this book is not really in Melville's league. the sheer improbability of the venture knocks the plot off the rails, and making matters worse CMcC indulges a # of plot by-ways, including the mystery of the narrator's ancestry, her strange3 marriage, her death wish, and her unexplained (so far) strained relationship w/ the ship's captain. The animal extinction is the premise of the novel, but it's unclear how this happened and what its effect is on human existence: Do farms, for example, continue to exist? How have people survived if so many animals have vanished? Questions and quibbles could go on, but not much point to that; for readers willing to buy into the improbabilities and the narrative hi-jinx, this could be a good read and, who knows?, maybe even a (better?) film. 

The many strengths - and one weakness - of The Brothers Karamazov

What's left to say in summary re Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov? It's a vast novel on one level - quite long, so much so that, by the end, I'm guessing most people will have forgotten much of the beginning (in that way, it's like life, time always slowly erasing experience). It's far less plot-driven than Crime and Punishment, though it does center on a crime (which we never actually "see," which of course sharpens the drama and the mystery) - but does so through by building up to the murder trial and its outcome (which I will not divulge) - rather than on the details of the crime and its effect on the character of a protagonist. It's philosophical in its way, as we get several chapters in which various characters discuss their world view and their faith or lack thereof (middle-brother Ivan's Grand Inquisitor chapter being the most famous of these). Mostly, it's about character, I would say - with its detailed examination of the conflicted relationship among the 3 brothers (as well as, to a lesser extent, their relation to the out-of-wedlock brother); the father is quickly delineated but plays a surprisingly minor role - the victim - in the scheme of this novel. What most struck me on this reading was FD's strong feelings about cruelty to animals and, even more so, about our cruelty to one another; he sets this out to two counterbalanced monologues - in the first section of the novel the long account of the life story of the monk (Z) who is the guiding light for the youngest brother, Alyosha; and then, in the final chapter that will inevitably move you to tears, Alyosha's address to the young boys who are mourning the death of their mate. And of course there are some great dramatic scenes in FD unique dramatic style of heightened emotions and frantic action - notably oldest brother Dimitri's mad expenditures just after the murder scene.  Readers will also note that, as with pretty much all of FD's work, this is a male-centered novel, with the women playing secondary parts at best - none really opens up and becomes a thoughtful, rounded character; the women are "types" whereas the men are vivid, each burdened (or blessed) with a complex interior life. So - it's not a novel for all readers, and will require the dedication of a lot of time and thought and much looking back at the list of key characters at the front of at least this translation (Pevear-Volokhonsky) - but that said it's makes for good reading during a time of isolation and quarantine. 

Excellent story by Susan Choi that succeeds by w/holding key information

Susan Choi - most known to me as a novelist, in particular for her excellent novel American Woman - is featured this week in the New Yorker with Flashlight, a short story - or maybe part of a in-the-works? In either event, the piece stands up well on its own merits. In short its tight focus is on a precocious, troubled 10-year-old girl who witnesses a tragedy, suffers from some form of PTSD it would seem, who acts out in through odd hostility and aggression. Her guardians (mother and aunt) send her to a child psychologist, at the request (order?) of the LA school department, and much of the story recounts her initial interview w/ the psychologist, whom she holds in contempt and fools him in a # of ways. So, this young woman could be developed much further if Choi is planning to expand on this opening - we're curious about her and sympathetic to her plight. As it stands, the story has several strengths - among them the credibility of the character, not easy to do w/ a 10-year-old in adult fiction - but of particular note is the manner in which Choi avoids a description of the key event in the story (I won't divulge it); it's an ellipsis, something all the more startling and terrible because Choi doesn't recount it directly. If there's a flaw, I'd say the story would be better if Choi ended it a few paragraphs sooner and didn't tell us what exactly the young woman (Luisa?) did to bring down the psychiatrist's wrath. We could - and should - figure that out by ourselves. 

Will non baseball fans like The Cactus League? Will fans?

What can I say about Emily Nemens's new (2020) novel, The Cactus League, except that I wish I'd like it more? The premise or concept is good: An inside look at the life and culture of major-league baseball through a series of loosely connected stories about various figures in the life of the LA Lions (aka Dodgers?) at the spring-training facility in Scottsdale. And the figures are not always the players themselves; we get a chapter/story about an agent, a hot-dog vender, a gathering of the players's wives, and others. The novel gets off to a good start, as EN captures well the look and feel of the training facility - I can vouch for that, having toured the Dodgers' site in AZ. But as the novel moves along its premise becomes ever shakier. In the first story we meet the star of the team and the central figure, Jason Goodyear, a guy with a squeaky-clean public image but w/ massive problems (mostly, a gambling addiction) that threatens his image and career. Well, its hard to believe this to be possible in this day and age of intense media scrutiny and culture of iPhones and instagram et al - and of course the team would go to great lengths to keep its star (2 mvps!) player in check. EN gives Goodyear a shot at redemption in the last story, which feels engineered and not sufficient to release Goodyear from his demons. Some of the stories en route are pretty good - but EN's knowledge about baseball is a bit suspect; to give just one ex., no MLB team would have a pitcher throw a 9-inning complete game in early- to mid- spring training. Most troubling, EN sets up a mystery in the first chapter that really had me curious - one of the coaches shows up in Scottsdale to find his house completely trashed. Who dunnit? EN never tells us - the set-up story is dropped by the wayside. So, unfortunately, it's likely that much of her ideal readership will be put off by too many facets of the novel, and I'm not sure how widely it would appeal to non-fans. Well, she needs no support from me; reviews have been strong, so, maybe I'm an outlier.