The incomparable Colombian novelist Gabriel García-Márquez is a master of the evocative book title. From Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) to El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (The Coronel Has No One Who Writes to Him) to Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) to El amor en tiempos de cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera) García-Márquez tells stories whose titles dare you to read them.
The last of these is clearly my inspiration this evening: Love in the Time of Cholera. As its literary signature, that genre of fiction writing that has become known as ‘magical realism’ juxtaposes an ordinary concept to the fantastical, odd, magical, or extraordinary. So for García-Márquez does love—that most ordinary, common, everyday virtue of human coexistence—jostle awkwardly and suggestively against the time of cholera. The once-in-a-century affliction of cholera, in all its epidemic phantagasmoria, reframes love almost entirely. It renders it poignant, out-of-time, compelling. It makes it something different that it is ordinarily understood to be. (more…)
Canter Bridge 