Volume 35, Number 7 · April 28, 1988
Heartsick
By Michael Wood
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman
Knopf, 348 pp., $18.95
The most casual reader, of García Márquez notes his fondness for numbers. There are one hundred years of solitude, and in the novel of that name the rain pours down on Macondo for exactly four years, eleven months, and two days. A traveler circles the earth sixty-five times. Gargantuan eaters consume for breakfast eight quarts of coffee, thirty raw eggs, and the juice of forty oranges. The numbers call up an air of legend, a precision that mildly mocks the idea of precision. But numbers can also suggest patience, an intimacy with the slow seepage of time. Closer to the numerical flavor of his new novel (published in Spanish in 1985), the sad and long-suffering hero of No One Writes to the Colonel needs, we are told, every counted minute of the seventy-five years of his life to arrive at the simple word that summarizes both his defeats and his dignity, his refusal to accept the unacceptable. He is a courteous, old-fashioned man, and has earlier rebuked a group of local youths for swearing. At last, however, nothing short of rude anger will do. 'Mierda,' the colonel says.
Review, 3344 words
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