Reading the 80s - 1985

Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) is a disturbing book. Like the landscape itself - beautiful, fragrant, lush, but poisonous with swamps and open sewers - everything in it is slightly infected, everything slightly rotten. Including love. Perhaps especially love. 

Most of all the fever-dream fanatic love of Fernando Ariza for a girl who married someone else – a life-time obsession which forms the backbone of this novel – but also a myriad other relationships in this book, sprouting like beautiful fungi on the rotten material of coercion, desperation, and madness. 

Perhaps the most disturbing thing is the way Marquez’s fine words make the facts of this story so much more palatable. He has the unsettling knack of making his main protagonist sympathetic whilst also making him ridiculous, manipulative, and worse, his heroine appealing while being foolish and bad tempered, and his descriptions of poverty and decay lyrical. 

Makes rainbows in fact, out of dead and dynamited fish. 

I first read the first 100 or so pages of The Vampire Lestat (Anne Rice) back in the 90s - I think I probably borrowed it from Archway Library, but bailed out and returned it not long after he got bit. From what I remember Lestat himself rather got on my nerves, killing eight wolves and having great successes on the stage even before he becomes a vampire, and I was more squeamish about descriptions of blood and rats and bodily functions than perhaps I am now. 

Only this time around has it occurred to me that he's probably meant to be an unreliable narrator. For example the vampire who turns him - did he relinquish his undeath in a fit of ennui as Lestat insists, or did Lestat kill him, steal his stuff, slaughter his servant? Did he really fight as hard to hold onto his humanity as he claims? 

And can there really have been quite so many murderers and cutthroats wandering the streets in Paris back in the late 1700s that Lestat could be as picky as he says about only feeding from killers? I mean three or four a night for a year would be over a thousand people, and the whole population of Paris was about 600, 000.  

Improbability mathematics aside, I have to admit it's just not gripping me. I can stretch my suspension of belief quite far as a rule, but I can't believe in Lestat. I didn't think he made a realistic human, and I don't care that he's become a vampire. I'd like to have my questions answered, but I don't actually want to go through the process of reading another 300-plus pages to get there. 

Perhaps at the end of the year (or more likely February now) I'll revisit it and see if I do better when I'm not reading to a (rough) deadline. Or perhaps I should simply start from 1980 again. I have The Heart of a Woman (Maya Angelou, 1981) and Lace (Shirley Conran, 1982) on my list already.  

In other reading news the 1976 Club, run by Simon at Stuck in a Book and Karen at Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings | "Vivre le livre!" (wordpress.com) starts tomorrow. Anyone can join in - just read a book from 1976 by the end of the week, write something about it (usually on your own blog) and let them know on theirs.