Fifty ways to leave your ‘Love’
The shadowy question mark hanging in the air above the film version of Gabriel GarcÃÂa Márquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera is whether a writing style so reliant on lexical texture could possibly work in a visual medium. If so, the film could be instructive to Salman Rushdie as he adapts his short story ‘The Firebird’s Nest’ for film. As mages of magical realism, the two authors are often mentioned in the same breath, much to Rushdie’s irritation. Márquez, whom I gave up on after One Hundred Years of Solitude, writes upmarket pulp. He churns out twists at the pace of dimestore novels with exhausting, page-long subplots which could support books in their own right.
The Cholera movie has drastically simplified that style and feels nothing like reading Márquez. It isn’t exactly good, but it is entertaining for diehard romantics. This Laila-Majnu story of lovers separated by a tyrannical father is straight Bollywood. The flick is at its essence a nipple menagerie — I lost count after ten pair. Javier Bardem is woefully miscast as a meek clerk, his jock chin the width of the Amazon. But since his tragic obsession is unfulfilled, the clerk turns into a legendary poon-hound. The film captures some truths, like this paraphrased dialogue:
‘Why are you so successful with women?’
‘Because they know I won’t harm them, they can see that I need love.’
It’s a fine summary of the mating strategy of bounders. The first half of the film is cheesy and laughable, but the latter half about old love between the aging Don Juan and the woman whom he obsessed over for half a century, matures into something like dignity. Bardem’s bedraggled gray scalp and his Galatea’s sagging rack set a high-water mark for aging prosthetics. Benjamin Bratt pulls a Rico Suave. John Leguizamo is as hammy as Amitabh here, his accent firmly situated at some intersection in Queens.
Bardem also plays the assassin in No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy novel. The difference in the movies’ source material couldn’t be starker. McCarthy pens taciturn, plot-driven potboilers which at first glance read a bit like Elmore Leonard. Some scenes in the book map cleanly and word-for-word to the movie. Márquez too is plot-centric, but takes many a florid detour along the way. None of that wonderful rhetorical texture comes through in this dialogue-light film, which is hamstrung by insisting that even its Italian female lead speak in a tawdry simulacrum of Colombian-accented English.
Márquez’ plots redefined literary sprawl. Modern editions of his novels diagram his family trees as maps for lost readers. Films pare away such epic plots, the constraints of the medium. But like The Namesake, this one doesn’t trim enough, lightly skimming over what it should inhabit. What we’re left with is not a film which evokes Márquez so much as a Lifetime drama loosely based on the plot of the book. It’s a separate work, and not in a good way.
Márquez anticipated the hackishness of Hollywood. He reputedly turned down over fifty earlier offers to adapt the novel. After seeing this effort, I’m more skeptical than ever that someone could film Midnight’s Children or The Ground Beneath Her Feet and have it feel anything like rococo, luscious Salman. Maybe it’s as well that Mike Newell didn’t try.
on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007, 12:05 pm in Film, Literature, Salman Rushdie › 
Email this
› 
Tweet this
› 
Facebook this
› 
Reddit this
› Link
› Reader links
Hi Manish: I love your writing style and really enjoy your posts - just wanted to say that :-)
Heh!
Thanks Raj!
>>
As mages of magical realism, the two authors are often mentioned in the same breath, much to Rushdie’s irritation. Márquez, whom I gave up on after One Hundred Years of Solitude, writes upmarket pulp. He churns out twists at the > pace of dimestore novels with exhausting, page-long subplots which could support books in their own right.
>>
Placing Rushdie in the same league (actually above) Gabriel Garcia-Marquez is akin to comparing George Bush favorably against Teddy Roosevelt. It would be Rushdie’s school-boy fantasy to be placed in such a league. Don’t get me wrong, anybody who is (or was) banging the sylph-like Padma Lakshimi has my attention, but as a writer Rushdie is ponderous, repetitive, meandering and sorely lacking lyrical grace.
You described Marquez’ style similar to Hemingway’ earlier, but contradict yourself with the above description. Rushdie is purely a construction of the mullah’s world-wide idiotic wrath… without it he would have sunk into rightful oblivion. He’s the 10th grader with a VERY large vocabulary and look-how-smart-I-am style of writing. Does his writing have the ability to transport? No. Rushdie has interesting plots, but cannot execute.
Rarely are great books translated into great movies… Poor Thackeray would have turned in his grave if he saw Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair. Reese Witherspoon never did capture the gamine-attractiveness of Becky. I dread seeing Love in the Time of Cholera, but I will because I love Marquez. This movies will simply add to the long list of abominable literature-to-film fiascoes.
My comment misled you- Marquez is nothing like Hemingway. Spare, stripped-down, taciturn are the last words you’d use to describe his style.
Funny, consistently fresh, poetic, and some of us read for the erudite digressions, far more than for the plot.
He doesn’t use vocab gratuitously, unlike some others in the genre. He is, however, a showman.
These things are highly subjective, but your taste is showing :)
Ouch. I was actually going to see the film because of Javier. I’m a fan of his. You already mentioned two of his films. I’d like to suggest Almodovar’s “Carne Tremula,” too.
Manish,
Marquez is amazing, and Rushdie is not even in the same league, not even the adjoining one, one down, even though Rushdie does have redeeming value.
Now picking “One Hundred……†as his first book to read is a bad choice. That book is steep in allegory, same names for different generations, and Latin American present politics, especially the role of military junta in rewriting (manipulating) collective consciousness.
Read a short book by him, “Chronicle of a Death Foretoldâ€Â. That is excellent first book to read, again has layers of meanings hidden - destiny, inevitability of fate, expectation by society, etc.
Now, “Love in the Time of Cholera†is a pretty complex love story in the novel, if you have read it. I do not think it can be made into a movie.
Spare, stripped-down, taciturn are the last words you’d use to describe his style.
Again read “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, sure, it is not taciturn like Hemingway but it is written in a very journalistic, third person, hazy memory recall unlike other books with flowing thoughts, and subplots (they also are hazy, but with magical realism in context).
Since Marquez started as a newspaper reporter (so did Hemingway), he used a true story as the basis for this tiny novella.
The bottom line is you haven’t figured out Marquez one bit.
“Chronicle …….” does have aspects of magic realism too, as it has warped timeline.
I second Rajkonya…Manish, you present such a sophisticated wit, that a true pleasure to look forward to.
Kush: Macaca please. Like Dickens, Marquez was clearly paid by the word. Mentioning him in the same breath as Rushdie is a travesty.
Dari: Thanks, y’all made my day.
Marquez’ novellas have the clarity and succinctness of a gem, esp. “Chronicle” (though I don’t think that could be described as magic-realism, just a very interesting examination of perception of time and history), but, for whatever reason, this does dissolve into mulch as soon as he takes on a greater breadth of vision. “Love…” especially, absolutely bored the piss out of me. His writing seems tailor-made for Richard and Judy bookclub types who’d like to mull over the constipated convolutions of, yes, “upmarket pulp” and happily confuse its wordiness for literature.
But Rushdie is no less guilty of gratuitous, over-indulgent litwank. (I’d hesitate to say ‘wordplay’ - it’d be an insult to those acrobats that do it - vargas llosa, lispector, kundera, calvino…)Yes, he is a showman, but so is David Copperfield. I’m all for erudite digressions, but he lacks the grace and dexterity that could save his baroque verbosity from slipping towards morbid obesity. Plus he’s such an asinine prick I can’t read a sentence without seeing his smug, balding face leering up from behind.
If you apply a personal life purity test, very little good literature will be left. The dissolute are far more interesting.
I can’t read a sentence without seeing his smug, balding face leering up from behind.
Rushdie is creepy looking… I always felt his leer would make a great Freddy-type visage.
Manish…
> Mentioning him in the same breath as Rushdie is a travesty.
This comment baffles me. I’ll just hold my breath & sputtering.
This is totally unrelated, but doesn’t Ustad Zakir Hussain (the Roger Federer of the Tabla) look like an older version Sanjaya of American Idol?