I started reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera yesterday, as every writer should at some point during a pandemic. It is so beautifully rich in language and poignant and, what I didn’t expect, funny. Here are two lines from early in the book I thought especially evocative:
“In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the houses and carried away children through the air.”
and
“At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.”
Wow.
I like Gabriel Garcia Marquez magical reality style, he said he got it from his grand mother :” The story was written in magical reality phenomenon, in dreamlike happenings, but was made believable the way my grandmother used to tell her stories during my childhood. She told the stories about things that are magical, supernatural and fantastical with a straight face and tone, so it sounded completely natural.”
I tried to write a blog about him, see whether you like it: https://stenote.blogspot.com/2014/09/an-interview-with-gabriel.html