It was my dad who introduced me to the novel “Love in the Time of Cholera.” He was a sentimentalist, and he liked to read the beginning of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's great work out loud, slowly ... savoring each word and intonation: “It was inevitable: The scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”
They are words that embrace passion and regret all at once, and yes, they should be read out loud.
Inspired by my father, and by the novel, I did the same thing many years later. Finding a copy of “Love in the Time of Cholera” on a shelf at City Lights Books in San Francisco, I proceeded to read the first paragraph to the woman with me. I don't know whether she was impressed, but I was, and still am: with the softness and poignancy of the writing.
Now “Love in the Time of Cholera” is a movie, opening today, directed by Mike Newell (“Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”) and starring Javier Bardem. It even comes with a promotional tagline: “How long would you wait for love?”
Written in Spanish (“El amor en los tiempos del cólera”) and published in faithful translation in 1985, Márquez's complex story of a romantic triangle seems a natural for a film adaptation (albeit for a limited audience in this filmic era of guns and gore). But the plot is merely the skeleton of Márquez's book; the rhythm of the words is almost certain to be lost in the adaptation.
We shall see.
I wonder how my dad would have felt about “Love in the Time of Cholera” being made into a movie, 22 years after its publication. The majority of the other novels he exposed me to – Jack Kerouac's “On the Road,” J.D. Salinger's “Catcher in the Rye,” John Kennedy O'Toole's “A Confederacy of Dunces” – were never adapted for the screen. It's still possible any or all of them could be, especially “Catcher in the Rye.”
But I believe he felt “Love in the Time of Cholera” was special, and I suspect he would've been apprehensive about its transformation into a film. So am I, but if the movie makes more people curious enough to read the book – again or for the first time – then its filming will have been well worth the undertaking.
I'll end with words from the novel that will be with me always, along with memories of my father: “One does not love one's children just because they are one's children, but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”
David L. Coddon: (619) 293-1348;
david.coddon@uniontrib.com
