Love in the Time of Cholera (54 page)
Read Love in the Time of Cholera Online
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez,Edith Grossman
‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is the essence of Márquez’
Guardian
‘Eréndira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow …’
Whilst her grotesque and demanding
grandmother retires to bed, Eréndira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table – and is fast asleep when it topples over …
Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount
that Eréndira must repay her for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Eréndira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?
‘It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what “fabulous” really means’
Time Out
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one
else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘One of this century’s most evocative writers’ Anne Tyler
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the centre of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm’
As a blizzard of warehouses and amusement
parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognizable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay.
Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding promise,
no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial – and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.
‘The most important writer of fiction in any language’ Bill Clinton
‘Márquez is a retailer of wonders’
Sunday Times
‘An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate, and extremely
funny’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn’t find. A thrilling miracle of a book’
The Times
Living to Tell the Tale
spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in Colombia in 1927, through his emerging career
as a writer, up to the 1950s and his proposal to the woman who would become his wife. Insightful, daring and beguiling in equal measure, it charts how García Márquez’s astonishing early life influenced the man who, more than any other, has been hailed as the twentieth century’s greatest and most-beloved writer.
‘A velvety pleasure to read. Márquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humour, a love letter to the dying light’ John Updike
‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself a gift of a night of wild love with
an adolescent virgin …’
He has never married, never loved and never gone to bed with a woman he didn’t pay. But on finding a young girl naked and asleep on the brothel owner’s bed, a passion is ignited in his heart – and he feels, for the first time, the urgent pangs of love.
Each night, exhausted by her factory work, ‘Delgadina’ sleeps peacefully whilst he watches her quietly. During these
solitary early hours, his love for her deepens and he finds himself reflecting on his newly found passion and the loveless life he had led. By day, his columns in the local newspaper are read avidly by those who recognize in his outpourings the enlivening and transformative power of love.
‘Márquez describes this amorous, sometimes disturbing journey with the grace and vigour of a master storyteller’
Daily Mail
‘There is not one stale sentence, redundant word, or unfinished thought’
The Times
