Now we're the grown-ups we were in such a hurry to become.

A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
A Prayer for Owen Meany is a story of love, friendship, predestination, and the triumphs and pitfalls of growing up. It follows two young boys, Johnny Wheelwright (our narrator) and Owen Meany, as they navigate their way from adolescence to adulthood in a small New Hampshire town. Due to a bizarre series of circumstances, Owen comes to believe his place on earth serves a very specific purpose, and the other realms of the plot conspire to bring us to the inevitable outcome of this belief. The backdrop of the novel spans from the early days of television to the Vietnam war era and beyond, and Owen's fervid obsession with his destiny is intricately tied to each historic event. Owen signs up to serve in the military, but his plans to travel to Vietnam for combat are thwarted, and it is on home soil that his prophetic dream of his final moments takes place. Each piece of Owen's identity plays an explicit role in his heroic death. In the end, Johnny is left wondering who he is without Owen, and ardently wishing that he (and the rest of the world) could have Owen back.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

I first read this book when I was a senior in high school, in Mrs. Brown's AP Literature and Composition class (I still miss the excitement of creating an identity for my portfolios - the Clark twins once broke into Mrs. Brown's car and left a tape in her cassette deck that told her to look under her seat to find their portfolio. Mildly disconcerting, but SO COOL!). I remember really enjoying the book then, and admittedly, I liked it much less this time around. I don't know if it's that I'm more critical having read more books now, or if I was more impressionable at the age when I first read it, but either way, I was disappointed on this reading. It's fairly rare that I like a book less on second reading, but it happens, and my devoted readers will know it's happened before with books on this blog. In any case, I do enjoy Irving as an author on the whole, and wouldn't recommend that you avoid him entirely simply because I don't highly recommend this particular work. (The World According to Garp and Hotel New Hampshire come highly recommended by Diana, if you're interested.) A few of my thoughts, in no real order...

-Irving, to the world: "May I please have a megaphone?"
I think a large part of why I didn't enjoy this book was that it felt like a thinly veiled attempt to give Irving an opportunity to trumpet his personal views to the world. It's nearly impossible for an author not to share some of his beliefs and opinions with his readers, intentionally or not, but in my view, good authors are able to do this in a way that doesn't feel preachy or obvious. Irving rolled out all the contentious subjects you can think of (religion, politics, literature) and took a huge swing at them, with a fairly see-through attempt to use Owen and Johnny as his mouthpiece. Maybe if I had agreed with some of his vitriolic opinions I wouldn't have been so annoyed, but in addition to feeling that Irving was just using his characters to share his own ideas, I also disagreed with most of them.  Didn't make for the best connection with his narrator. Next time you want to complain about politics, Irving, just write an op-ed!

-Grandmothers, and the relativity of their logic
I liked Johnny's grandmother, in large part because she reminded me of my own grandmother. Here's a line I loved:
"If she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in her rose garden, they were cocktail dresses that she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties. Even in her rose garden, she did not want to be seen underdressed. If the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out. When my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said, "What? And have those people at the cleaners wonder what I was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?"
   From my grandmother I learned that logic is relative."

-The trouble with church
While I disagreed with much of Irving's (ahem, Owen and Johnny's) feelings about religion, I did like this line about church. (NB: The capitals are courtesy of Irving - whenever Owen speaks, it's written in all capitals.)
"A PERSON'S FAITH GOES AT ITS OWN PACE. THE TROUBLE WITH CHURCH IS THE SERVICE. A SERVICE IS CONDUCTED FOR A MASS AUDIENCE. JUST WHEN I START TO LIKE THE HYMN, EVERYONE PLOPS DOWN TO PRAY. JUST WHEN I START TO HEAR THE PRAYER, EVERYONE POPS UP TO SING. AND WHAT DOES THE STUPID SERMON HAVE TO DO WITH GOD? WHO KNOWS WHAT GOD THINKS OF CURRENT EVENTS? WHO CARES?"

-"Did you copy that? Copycat." 
So I didn't mention this in the plot summary, as it was a fairly bare-bones version of events, but one of the larger plot points centers around Johnny not knowing the identity of his father. His mother claims she had a fling on a train, but Owen and Johnny are convinced that Johnny's father was present at the baseball game where Johnny's mother was accidentally killed, and they spend much of the later part of the novel trying to remember all of the faces in the bleacher seats. In the end, rather anticlimactically, Johnny's father is a sort of loser of a preacher, Reverend Merrill. I found this to be particularly dull, considering that the illegitimate child in The Scarlet Letter (another New England tale) is also fathered by the Reverend (Arthur Dimmesdale). I know it's not like there's a monopoly on illegitimate fathers, but it seemed a little cliché to me. There were so many other options, Irving! Why not the mailman, or the next-door neighbor?

-Love, and a bit wiv an armadillo
One of my favorite parts of the book was the stuffed armadillo that Dan (Johnny's eventual stepfather) brings to Johnny the first time he meets him. Here are a few of my favorite armadillo-themed passages:

Dan: "You must be Johnny. I know you can be trusted with an important package. It's not for you, it's not for anyone your age. But I'm trusting you to put it somewhere where it can't be stepped on - and out of the way of any pets, if you have pets. You mustn't let a pet near it. And whatever you do, don't open it. Just tell me if it moves." hagh. fanTastic way to meet someone. Next time I meet someone new, I'll know to bring them a stuffed armadillo in a brown paper bag. SooPrize!

"When Owen would sleep in the other twin bed in my room, with the night table between us, we would carefully arrange the armadillo under the bedside lamp; in exact profile to both of us, the creature stared at the feet of our beds."

Owen, to Johnny: "FROM WHAT YOU TELL ME ABOUT YOUR COUSINS, I DON'T THINK YOU SHOULD TAKE THE ARMADILLO TO SAWYER DEPOT. It had never occurred to me to take the armadillo with me, but Owen had clearly given some though to the potential tragedy of such a journey. "YOU MIGHT FORGET IT ON THE TRAIN. OR THAT DOG OF THEIRS MIGHT CHEW ON IT. WHAT'S THE DOG'S NAME?"
   "Firewater."
 "YES, FIREWATER - HE SOUNDS DANGEROUS TO THE ARMADILLO TO ME. AND IF YOUR COUSINS ARE THESE RUFFIANS, LIKE YOU SAY, THERE'S NO TELLING WHAT KIND OF GAME THEY MIGHT THINK UP - THEY MIGHT RIP THE ARMADILLO TO PIECES, OR LOSE IT IN THE SNOW."
  "Yes, you're right."
 "IF THEY WANTED TO TAKE THE ARMADILLO WATERSKIING, COULD YOU STOP THEM?"
   "Probably not."
  "THAT'S JUST WHAT I THOUGHT. YOU BETTER NOT TAKE THE ARMADILLO WITH YOU. YOU BETTER LET ME TAKE IT HOME. I CAN LOOK AFTER IT WHILE YOU'RE AWAY."
  "I never thought of that."
 "WELL, IT WOULD BE VERY SAFE WITH ME." adorable. I love the idea of Owen taking home the treasured armadillo and snuggling it into his room.

-Owen meets the ruffian cousins
"WELL, I'VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT WHAT WE COULD DO. THE RIVER IS FROZEN, SO THE SKATING IS VERY GOOD, AND I KNOW YOU ENJOY VERY ACTIVE THINGS LIKE THAT - THAT YOU ENJOY THINGS LIKE SPEED AND DANGER AND COLD WEATHER. SO SKATING IS ONE IDEA. AND EVEN THOUGH THE RIVER IS FROZEN, I'M SURE THERE ARE CRACKS SOMEWHERE, AND EVEN PLACES WHERE THERE ARE HOLES OF OPEN WATER - I FELL IN ONE LAST YEAR. I'M NOT SUCH A GOOD SKATER, BUT I'D BE HAPPY TO GO WITH YOU, EVEN THOUGH I'M GETTING OVER A COLD, SO I SUPPOSE I SHOULDN'T BE OUTSIDE FOR LONG PERIODS OF TIME IN THIS WEATHER." This was such a great scene because Owen was really nervous to meet the crazy cousins. I didn't mention it, but Owen is extremely diminutive (just 5 feet tall) and rather delicate, and Johnny's cousins are rabble-rousing crazy cats. Johnny is shocked by their reaction to Owen, and I just loved the way Owen jumped right in the first time he met them and called their bluff.

-It's called foreshadowing, not "beat-you-over-the-head"-shadowing
Part of my annoyance with this book stemmed from the fact that Irving was, as I put it to Diana, 'more heavy-handed than Dickens with his foreshadowing'. And let me tell you, that's Saying Something. It's one thing to know from the beginning of the book that Owen will die, but Every Single Event was something we Already Knew Was Going to Happen. Hello, Irving, where's the element of surprise?

-Johnny, on losing his mother
"When someone you love dies, and you're not expecting it, you don't lose her all at once; you lose her in pieces over a long time - the way the mail stops coming, and her scent fades from the pillows and even from the clothes in her closet and drawers. Gradually, you accumulate the parts of her that are gone."

-Wigs
In her later years, Johnny's grandmother starts to struggle with remembering things, and she wreaks some pretty serious havoc on her various servants. I loved this passage in particular:

"Grandmother hid her wigs so that these luckless ladies could not find them; then she would abuse these fools for misplacing her vital headpieces.
 'Do you actually expect me to wander the world as if I were an addlepated bald woman escaped from the circus?' she would say.
  'Missus Wheelwright - where did you put your wigs?' the women would ask her.
  'Are you actually accusing me of intentionally desiring to look like the lunatic victim of a nuclear disaster?' my grandmother would ask them. 'I would rather be murdered by a maniac than be bald!'
  More wigs were bought; most - but by no means all - of the old wigs were found. When Grandmother especially disliked a wig, she would retire it in the rose garden by submerging it in the birdbath.
   And when the Poggios continued to send total strangers to her door - intent on startling her - Harriet Wheelwright responded by startling them in return. She would dart to open the door for them - sprinting ahead of Ethel or Ethel's replacements - and she would greet the terrified delivery boys by snatching her wig off her head and shrieking at them while she was bald." ahghaghaghaghaghaghagha. Remind me to start stuffing unwanted items in the birdbath, Mom! And next time I have a bad hair day and someone dares to comment on it, I'll have to remember to retort, "Are you actually accusing me of intentionally desiring to look like the lunatic victim of a nuclear disaster?" ahghaghaghaghaghaghahg.

Sentences that struck me:

• My grandmother said that Owen resembled an embryonic fox.

• I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar - you live next to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace. 

• There was not a night when my mother lay in her bed unable to see the comforting figure of the dressmaker's dummy; it was not only her confederate against the darkness, it was her double.

• Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

Owen, to Johnny, on why reading is a gift:

"IT DOESN'T MATTER WHERE YOU LEARNED IT - IT'S A GIFT. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SOMETHING, YOU HAVE TO PROTECT IT - IF YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO FIND A WAY OF LIFE YOU LOVE, YOU HAVE TO FIND THE COURAGE TO LIVE IT."

Onwards to The Young Boy and the Pond. Join me if you feel inspired! Find the courage to live the way of life you love. Enjoy the crunching of leaves, the pumpkin-spiced beverages, and the crisp air on your cheeks while you can. Winter is on its way!

What does this mad myth signify?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Like Love in the Time of Cholera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is an unconventional* love story. We follow the lives of several pairings of lovers, blending their perspectives on life, death, love, and everything in between. The Prague Spring and Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia provide the backdrop to our story, and its personal and political ramifications play out in the lives of the characters. Kundera paints a contemplative portrait of existence, and his protagonists illustrate his metaphysical musings.

* As in Cholera, love flows not simply from one person to another but from one, to another, to a third, back to the first, and so on and so on. Below is a breakdown of the various marriages and affairs by pairing:

{Tereza + [Tomas} + {Sabina] + [Franz} + Marie-Claude]
Spoiler Over: Continue Here


I really enjoyed this novel, though I wasn't sure what I would think of it at first. My sister, Diana, was less than whelmed by it, and we traditionally have similar tastes, but as always, I tried to open my mind and heart to the book, and when I did, I was pleasantly surprised. Kundera strikes a tender balance between the philosophical treatise and traditional novel, and his characters flesh out his mental quandaries in a way that I found organic and beautiful. Like Cholera, I'd suggest patience with this one if you're planning to read or have read and didn't get through. It took time for me to feel out the flow of it, and its rhythm was not immediately apparent.

- On this life being our only go-round
"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." Kundera comes back to this theme with some frequency. I loved the idea that we can't weigh our lives against other versions of them, or make changes and try again, because this is the only one we have. 

- On compassion
"Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." Tomas is tortured by Tereza's bad dreams at one point, and realizes that he could withstand violence against the rest of the country and the world (to his horror) but her grief and pain from her dreams is unbearable.

- Reading a book is the best first move
"He had an open book on his table. In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood." Tereza falls for Tomas when he's the only one reading at the restaurant she works at. I loved this moment because more often than not, I'm the one with my nose in a book. Maybe all I need to do to find my Tomas is read at restaurants more often! ;)

- On cutting novels some slack and seeing the small things in our own lives more
"It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences (like the meeting of Anna, Vronsky, the railway station, and death or the meeting of Beethoven, Tomas, Tereza, and the cognac), but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty." Kundera points out that while novels seem to be rife with coincidences and fortuitous events, our own lives possess them as well, and in our need to see novels as fiction, we preclude ourselves from seeing the chance moments in our own lives. Open your eyes to these moments more - maybe you'll be surprised by their poignancy!

- On the Russian invasion
-- "Photographers...preserve the face of violence for the distant future." I loved this line - Tereza and Sabina are both photographers, and they record the events of the Prague Spring and Russian invasion. In today's world, photographs are an assumed artifact of our existence; they provide incontrovertible proof of an event's occurrence. What would we believe more deeply from 200 or 2,000 years ago if we had photographs of everything? Might those photographs keep us from repeating mistakes?
-- "The Russian invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled with a curious (and no longer explicable) euphoria."
-- "It is a tragicomic fact that our proper upbringing has become an ally of the secret police. We do not know how to lie." The political upheaval of Prague was intertwined with the characters' lives in an understated, yet fascinating way. I thought this line was a perfect illustration of Kundera's self-reflective narration and this pairing of the personal and political.

- Living abroad
"Being in a foreign country means walking a tightrope high above the ground without the net afforded a person by the country where he has his family, colleagues, and friends, and where he can easily say what he has to say in a language he has known from childhood." I found this such a poignant depiction of living in another country - when I lived in France, I felt much like Tereza after she moved to Switzerland. I've often bemoaned the fact that among other things, I lost my sense of humor - I wasn't fluent enough in French to be funny, or tell a humorous story. It's a tenuous balance, blending the joy of experiencing such newness and feeling so removed from the familiar.

- 'Words Misunderstood'
Kundera includes a "words misunderstood" section to describe the disconnect in Franz and Sabina's relationship. It was one of my favorite parts of the novel. Here's an example:

cemetery 

• Sabina: "When the sun goes down, the cemetery sparkles with tiny candles. It looks as though the dead are dancing at a children's ball... No matter how brutal life becomes, peace always reigns in the cemetery...against a backdrop of blue hills, they were as beautiful as a lullaby." This is how I feel about cemeteries. I still remember Père Lachaise in Paris and its meandering elegance, the gatekeeper for the likes of Balzac, Chopin, Modigliani, and Proust.

• Franz: "For Franz, a cemetery was an ugly dump of stones and bones."

Later, after they've separated, Sabina comes to see Franz's point of view on things more, and Kundera writes:
"Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other." What an exquisite sentence.

- Karenin (love, and a bit wiv a dog)
Hands down, the most heartbreaking moment (SPOILER ALERT! I know, it's out of place - Sorry!) was when Karenin, Tomas and Tereza's dog, dies. They euthanize him at home, and the last few weeks they share with him as he's dying are heartrending. Here are a few of my favorite lines about him (actually, he's a she, but they decide that Karenin is the most appropriate fit for him from Anna K, which Tereza was reading at the time. I don't know anyone that gives a pet the wrong gendered name (AHEM. Harvey.):

- "Lately, Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being welcomed into the day by Karenin. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naïve and simple amusement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased. She, on the other hand, awoke with great reluctance, with a desire to stave off the day by keeping her eyes closed." This is exactly how I feel about my cat, Suzy. She's delighted to get up each day, if for no other reason than to badger me into consciousness, while I (and my chronic sleep apnea) feel a bit more like this Brad Pitt line from Ocean's Twelve: "Are you suicidal?" "Only in the morning."

- "Her home was Karenin, not Tomas. Who would wind the clock of their days when he was gone?" When Tomas and Tereza were getting ready to put Karenin down (Tomas is a doctor until he's forced to abandon his career due to persecution by the secret police), it reminded me of a time I took Suzy to the vet about a year ago. I was sitting in the waiting room with her in her travel carrier, and when I looked across the lobby, I saw a couple holding their cat in their laps. I was confused, and immediately thought that maybe they were a new-agey couple, and that they felt the carrier was too confining for their kitty. I didn't think much more of it, and went in with Suzy for her appointment. When I came out toting Suzy, the couple was standing next to the receptionist and weeping. Their arms were empty. Only then did I realize that they didn't bring a carrier because they were bringing their cat to be put down. On the way back home, I told Suzy profusely how much I loved her, and how sorry I felt for that couple. I also promptly told my rooommate, Josh, how great it was that that would never be a problem with Suzy because she was Never Going to Die. (#isn'tdenialthebest?) I Could tell you that I didn't weep uncontrollably when Karenin died. I could Also tell you I have three heads and a million dollars in the bank.

- On characters
Like Proust, Kundera pontificates about writing while he's writing. Some people probably find this very pretentious, but I find it's the moment when I feel most connected to an author. Here are a few of my favorite moments like this from the book:
--"Characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about."
--"The characters in my novels are all my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented."

Sentences that struck me:

• "Tomas lived under the hypnotic spell cast by the excruciating beauty of Tereza's dreams."

• "Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love."

• "The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's unintentional. It arose independent of human design, like a stalagmitic cavern." -- in other words, "Beauty by mistake."

• "What does it mean to live in truth?"

In the last scene of the book, we experience the night before Tomas and Tereza die. (Sorry, I know I'm spoiling all over the place. It's no use crying over spoiled spoiler alerts, now is it?) We know they're going to die because we've already heard the news earlier in the novel, and Tereza suspects that their end is near. It was one of my favorite moments in the novel, so I'll leave you with it.

"On they danced to the strains of the piano and violin. Tereza leaned her head on Tomas's shoulder. Just as she had when they flew together in the airplane through the storm clouds. She was experiencing the same odd happiness and the odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: we are at the last station. The happiness meant: we are together."

Onwards to Hocus Pocus, Practical Magic, pumpkins and midnight margaritas! I'll be back with An Invocation for Lewis Nicepants. Adieu!

Little by little the fragrance of Fermina Daza became less frequent and less intense, and at last it remained only in white gardenias.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Love in the Time of Cholera is a love story, but not in the traditional sense. It spans decades (over half a century, in fact) and tells both of the all-consuming passion of the bloom of young love and the more subdued, but no less powerful magnetism of companionship and shared lifetimes. We follow the lives of Fermina Daza, a young daughter of a sketchy businessman in South America, Florentino Ariza, the eclectic son of a notions merchant, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a second-generation aristocrat and enterprising doctor. The book begins with the death of Dr. Urbino after nearly 50 years of marriage to Fermina Daza, and traces back to the love affair between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza that predates her marriage, and begins anew after her husband's death. Love emerges in both classic and entirely unexpected ways, in various iterations and permutations. The end result is not, therefore, a straightforward, linear tale of two lovers, but a stunning portrayal of love in all its forms.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here

I loved this book. If you know me personally and you've chatted with me while I was reading the earlier stages of the book, you know that I wasn't wild about it when I first started it. But, much like Hemingway's novels, the book crept up on me. The language was undeniably magnificent, and the imagery sublime, but it wasn't until over halfway through that I felt the poignant tenderness of Florentino Ariza's unswerving passion for Fermina Daza, and her complicated path of maturity and journey to motherhood and beyond. If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend it. I do recommend you enter into the book with an open mind, and perhaps even more importantly, a good dose of patience.

- Dr. Urbino's library (#iwantit)
"But no other room displayed the meticulous solemnity of the library, the sanctuary of Dr. Urbino until old age carried him off. There, all around his father's walnut desk and the tufted leather easy chairs, he had lined the walls and even the windows with shelves behind glass doors, and had arranged in an almost demented order the three thousand volumes bound in identical calfskin with his initials in gold on the spines. Unlike the other rooms, which were at the mercy of noise and foul winds from the port, the library always enjoyed the tranquillity and fragrance of an abbey." As a side-note, Florentino Ariza is also an avid reader, but since he isn't as well off as Dr. Urbino until much later in his life, it says Florentino lovingly sewed his novels into cardboard covers. What a sweetheart. <3 adorable="" i="">

- Universality
I am always most struck by the moments in books that seem piercingly relevant to life today. Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza have a big fight after several very calm years of marriage, and, as is often the case, the fight is not over anything substantial, but in fact, over whether or not Fermina Daza had remembered to restock the soap. I loved the moment when, after an extended period of being confined to another room each night, Dr. Urbino falls asleep on their bed, and when Fermina Daza tries to shake him awake and send him off, he finally relents, and just mumbles, "Let me stay here, there was soap." :)

- Florentino Ariza, when he sees Fermina Daza on Christmas Eve
"In the din of fireworks and native drums, of colored lights in the doorways and the clamor of the crowd yearning for peace, Florentino Ariza wandered like a sleepwalker until dawn, watching the fiesta through his tears, dazed by the hallucination that it was he and not God who had been born that night."

- Love without speaking (Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza (the first time around)
"It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them. Never in that delirious spring, or in the following year, did they have the opportunity to speak to each other."Can you imagine falling in love with someone in this day and age and not being able to speak to them for over a year? 

- Soul crushing agony - when young Fermina Daza rejects young Florentino Ariza
"Now, instead of the commotion of love, she felt the abyss of disenchantment. In an instant the magnitude of her own mistake was revealed to her, and she asked herself, appalled, how she could have nurtured such a chimera in her heart for so long and with so much ferocity. She just managed to think: My God, poor man! Florentino Ariza smiled, tried to say something, tried to follow her, but she erased him from her life with a wave of her hand."  and later, "Today when I saw you, I realized that what is between us is nothing more than an illusion." I died a little in my heart when this happened. I knew the passion of their youthful amour was too effusive to last, but I never expected her to totally rescind her affection! 

- 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days
is how long Florentino Ariza waits to re-confess his love for Fermina Daza. I'm not sure there's anything in my life I would wait 51 years for. Maybe if you told me I could have a million dollars in 51 years, or a super-fantastic house, or a multi-year vacation across the globe. But still, I'm not sure. 51 years is a Long, Long time.

- Fermina Daza's cousin, Hildebranda, on meeting the newly spurned Florentino Ariza
"He is ugly and sad, but he is all love." possibly my favorite description of a protagonist ever.

Florentino Ariza's appearance: "The only area in which he persisted in defying time and fashion was in his somber attire, his anachronistic frock coats, his unique hat, the poet's string ties from his mother's notions shop, his sinister umbrella." I could just picture Florentino Ariza, standing in today's relentless rain, staring back at me and clutching his sinister umbrella.

- Letters from Florentino
"This was the period when he spent his free time int he Arcade of the Scribes, helping unlettered lovers to write their scented love notes, in order to unburden his heart of all the words of love that he could not use in customs reports." Florentino has too much love to know what to do with, so he starts writing love letters for other people. Amusingly enough, this leads to him writing both sides of some love affairs:
 "and so it was that he became involved in a feverish correspondence with himself."hehe, oh, Florentino. such a romantic!

- Florentino, on a love letter wooing Fermina Daza after the death of her husband
"It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone's. It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself."

- Love is love at any age. Take that, Ofelia!
Ofelia Urbino Daza (Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino's daughter), to her brother, on her mother's late blooming affection for Florentino Ariza: "Love is ridiculous at our age, but at theirs it is revolting."

Fermina Daza's response: "The only thing that hurts me is that I do not have the strength to give you the beating you deserve for being insolent and evil-minded. But you will leave this house right now, and I swear to you on my mother's grave that you will not set foot in it again as long as I live." that's right, Fermina Daza! you tell her!

- On Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza
Fermina Daza, and Florentino's hope that she may have room to love him after all his waiting: "She began to speak of her dead husband in the present tense, as if he were alive, and Florentino Ariza knew then that for her, too, the time had come to ask herself with dignity, with majesty, with an irrepressible desire to live, what she should do with the love that had been left behind without a master."

- Don't worry, it's not cholera - it's love
When Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza finally get together (in their seventies), they sail on a riverboat full of companions. The trip to their destination is fine (they're in the early stages of companionship), but they're horrified by the public nature of the audience they would need to share their love with on their return, so Florentino Ariza, who runs the riverboat company, tells the captain to fly the boat home with a cholera flag (which suggests the ship is quarantined, and would require only Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and critical crew members on the ship).
- "If such things were done for so many immoral, even contemptible reasons, Florentino Ariza could not see why it would not be legitimate to do them for love."
- "During the day they played cards, ate until they were bursting, took gritty siestas that left them exhausted, and as soon as the sun was down the orchestra began to play, and they had anisette with salmon until they could eat and drink no more." sounds perfect to me!

My favorite passage in the whole book, on Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza together (at last) in their seventies:
"It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death."

Particularly Pleasing Passages

• "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."

• on Florentino Ariza's serenades: "One of his favorite spots was the paupers' cemetery, exposed to the sun and the rain on an indigent hill, where turkey buzzards dozed and the music achieved a supernatural resonance. Later he learned to recognize the direction of the winds, and in this way he was certain that his melody carried as far as it had to."

• on daily life at a brothel where Florentino made an unusual number of friends (just regular friends, readers - he had plenty of special friends while he waited for Fermina Daza, but oddly enough not at the brothel): "It was a daily fiesta that lasted until dusk, when the naked women marched, singing, toward the bathrooms, asked to borrow soap, toothbrushes, scissors, cut each other's hair, dressed in borrowed clothes, painted themselves like lugubrious clowns, and went out to hunt the first prey of the night. Then life in the house became impersonal and dehumanized, and it was impossible to share in it without paying."

• on Fermina Daza and her father's return home from their journey: "Fermina Daza was no longer the only child, both spoiled and tyrannized by her father, but the lady and mistress of an empire of dust and cobwebs that could be saved only by the strength of invincible love."

• Dr. Juvenal Urbino, trying to fall asleep the night after his return 'home' from school in Paris: "He was tormented by the hallucinating screams of the madwomen in the Divine Shepherdess Asylum next door, the harsh dripping from the water jar into the washbasin which resonated throughout the house, the long-legged steps of the curlew wandering in his bedroom, his congenital fear of the dark, and the invisible presence of his dead father in the vast sleeping mansion."

• "Then there was such a diaphanous silence that despite the disorder of the birds and the syllables of water on stone, one could hear the desolate breath of the sea."

• "From time to time, fragments of fugitive voices escaped through open balconies, bedroom confidences, sobs of love magnified by phantasmal acoustics and the hot fragrance of jasmine in the narrow, sleeping streets."

• on Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino's marriage: "Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy."

• "The wind from the Caribbean blew in the windows along with the racket made by the birds, and Fermina Daza felt in her blood the wild beating of her free will."

May you feel your free will beating in your blood and feel the wind at your back. Onwards to The Intolerable Heaviness of Existence. Join me if you please!