El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928 in Aracataca, a Colombian banana town in the Caribbean. He was raised by his maternal grandparents, who were a great influence on him. Since his parents had economic and social difficulties, Gabo (García Márquez) lived with them until he was 8 years old, when the colonel passed away and his grandma had sight problems. He went to live with his parents in Sucre, where his father was working as a pharmacist. Soon after he was sent to a boarding school in Barranquilla.
In 1940, he was awarded a scholarship in the Liceo Nacional, a high school for gifted students run by Jesuits. In 1946 he started his university education as a law student in the Universidad Nacional, in Bogotá. Since he had no interest in law at all, he began to abandon his academic life and eventually, himself. It was Kafka's The Metamorphosis that made him comprehend literature did not have to follow a fixed narrative and plot. As a result of this revelation, he started reading avidly and writing his first stories, which were praised and published in 1946 in "El Espectador," a Liberal newspaper of Bogotá.
Some political events in 1948—the assassination of Gaitán, the closure of the Universidad Nacional or, el "Bogotazo"— made Gabo transfer to the Universidad de Cartagena where he was still studying law. He got a daily column in a local newspaper, something he enjoyed much more. In 1950 he decided to abandon his law studies and moved to Barranquilla to write. There he became part of a literary clique, el "grupo de Barranquilla." Under their influence he began to read the classics and the work of Hemingway, Woolf, Joyce and Faulkner. Sophocles and William Faulkner greatly influenced his writings in the late forties and early fifties. From Faulkner, he learned to write about things close to his reality. The novella titled La Hojarasca (Leaf Storm,1955) was the result of this.
After some difficulties, he moved back to Bogotá in 1954, where he got a job writing stories and film reviews for a newspaper, "El Espectador." While working on a story, he involved the Pinilla government. Worried that the dictator might persecute García Márquez directly, his editors sent him on assignment to Italy. He then wandered around Europe as a correspondent, studied film in Rome, traveled through Geneva, Poland and Hungary to settle in Paris. It was there where he found out that the Pinilla government had shut down his paper. Without a job and money, he wrote the drafts for El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel), and part of Este pueblo de mierda (what would later on be La mala hora—In Evil Hour). Soon after he traveled to London, he moved to Venezuela, the destination of most Colombian refugees. In 1957 he toured with an old friend through Europe's communist countries, writing articles for various Latin American publications. In 1958 he risked a visit to Colombia to marry his girlfriend. Both of them slipped back to Caracas. Soon after the paper he was working for, took a different political direction, something that made García Márquez resign. The couple ended in Havana, and García Márquez worked covering the revolution.
In 1959 the family moved to New York and then to Mexico City not too long after, where he worked on screenplays and wrote subtitles for films. He finally could publish some of his works: El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1961), Los funerals de Mamá Grande (Big Mama's Funeral, 1962), and sent Este pueblo de mierda to the Colombian Esso literary contest changing its title to La mala hora (In Evil Hour). The novel won the contest and was published in Madrid in 1962. The publisher changed the language, the Latin American slang, etc, so Gabo repudiated it. The book was finally published as Gabo had written it in 1966.
In January 1965, he began writing his masterpiece, Cien años de soledad (A Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967). The novel was translated into over a dozen languages and won many international prizes. Other works to follow were La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada (Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories, 1972), Cuando era feliz e indocumentado (When I Was Happy and Uninformed,1975) a collection of his journalistic work from the fifties. Aware of his power as a writer, he began to pursue his interests in political activism, getting involved in different causes.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize of literature in 1982. The lecture of acceptance of the prize, "The Solitude of Latin America" was a tribute to Latin America.
Other major novels and novellas are: El otoño del patriarca (Autumn of the Patriarch, 1975), Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1982), El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera, 1984), El general en su laberinto (The General in his Labyrinth, 1991), Doce cuentos peregrinos, (Strange Pilgrims, 1992), Del amor y otros demonios (Love and Other Demons, 1994), Noticia de un secuestro (News of a Kidnapping, 1997), Vivir para contarla (2002) and Memoria de mis putas tristes (Memories of my Melancholy Whores, 2004).
I cannot write about film and literature without mentioning the important role these two disciplines have played in García Márquez' life. Cinema is one of his passions, and he has always been close to it. He worked as a film critic for a while, translated and wrote subtitles and wrote screenplays. In the early 1960s, Gabo lived in Mexico where he tried to make a living as a screenwriter. During this time he got acquainted with the director Arturo Ripstein, among others.
Although he wrote (or co-wrote) screenplays such as Juego peligroso (Mexico, Luis Alcoriza and Arturo Ripstein, 1967), Tiempo de morir (A Time to Die, Mexico, Jorge Alí Triana, 1985), Fábula de la bella palomera (Fable of the Beautiful Pigeon Fancier)
(Spain, Ruy Guerra, 1988) and Edipo alcalde (Colombia, Jorge Alí Triana, 1996), he had to admit that film was not the best medium to transmit what he had to say. He recognized that film could be much more limited than novels. This is one of the reasons he would never allow anyone to adapt Cien años de soledad, because he wished readers to continue imagining the characters.
The Films based on his literary works are: María de mi corazón (María my Dearest, Mexico, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, 1979), Eréndira (Mexico, Ruy Guerra, 1983), Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Italy-France, Francesco Rosi, 1987), Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes (A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, Cuba, Fernando Birri, 1988), Mujer que llegaba a las seis (Mexico, Arturo Flores and Rogelio Jaramillo, 1991), El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (No One Writes to the Colonel, Mexico, Arturo Ripstein, 1999) and finally, the object of our interest, Love in the Time of Cholera (USA, Mike Newell, 2007).
The Novel (1985)
El amor en los tiempos del cólera was the first novel by Gabriel García Márquez to be published after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1982. The story takes place in a Caribbean coastal city, unnamed but said to be a blend of Cartagena and Barranquilla, between about 1880 and 1930. The three main characters form a love triangle —something we already saw in Carmen and Bodas de Sangre.
Florentino Ariza, a young apprentice telegrapher, meets Fermina Daza and falls in love with her instantly. Without having seen each other or talked for a long time, they engage in a secret affair by letters and telegrams even after Fermina's father sends her away on a journey, in order to help her forget Florentino. When she returns, she rejects him, marrying Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. Although this would be a terrible reversal for anyone, Florentino swears he will love her forever and decides to wait for her as long as he has to, until she is free again. This turns to be 51 years, 9 moths and 4 days when Dr. Juvenal dies absurdly.
After the funeral and when everyone has already left, Florentino declares his love again, announcing he has waited for more than a half a century to repeat his vow of love and eternal fidelity. Furious and shocked, Fermina asks him to leave the house. This confrontation takes place at the end of the first chapter. García Márquez then goes back 50 years to follow the lives of the three characters: through the years of Urbino and Fermina's marriage, the rise of Florentino at the River Company, the turn of the century, the fighting of the cholera, etc. The last chapter takes up where the first one left off, and Florentino decides to court Fermina again, doing whatever it takes, until she loves him in return.
The novel is a universal story of love's ability to transcend time, while presenting a great portrait of Colombian history in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries. In El amor en los tiempos del cólera, cultural history is secondary to the theme of love, its mystery and the effect it has on individuals. Márquez develops a deep study on the nature of love with its different forms and implications: as an obsession, as a force of nature or even as an agent of sexuality.
The quality of the novel, the historical and cultural elements and the universal treatment of love transcend the melodramatic elements of this courtship, pointing out once again the importance of choosing solid, strong literary woks when dealing with adaptations.
About the Film. . .
After years of turning down Hollywood's offers to buy the rights to adapt El amor en los tiempos del cólera, García Marquez agreed at last to sell them. Currently in production, this will be the first English-language screen adaptation of a work by García Márquez. Other novels and stories like El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (Mexico-France-Spain, Arturo Ripstein, 1999) or Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Colombia-France-Italy, Francesco Rosi, 1987) have been adapted by Latin American or Italian filmmakers, but Hollywood had never been allowed to do so.
The movie is to be released in mid November of this year, 2007. This final part of the unit will not be taught until May, so we will have enough time to fully work with parts of the novel in order to view the film. The fact that the film will only be coming out during the school year will give me the opportunity to create some mystery and develop activities exploring how students would adapt the novel. We can watch the attention given to it and read some criticism of the adaptation before seeing it and making up our own minds. This makes the question of adaptation come alive.
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