quest' amore

"And how long do you think we can keep up this goddamn coming and going?" he asked.
Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights.
"Forever" he said.

ends the love in the time of cholera book, a pretty beautiful book with a pretty beautiful ending that kind of reminds me of the end of the princess bride only, you know, with radically different though no less mythic and way older characters and a touch less hilarity (but a little hilarity).

though I'm not sure what to do with things like his description of prostitutes as the "night birds of emergency love" which is a stunning figuration and yet romanticizes something that I imagine was not in the nineteenth century (is not now) all glorious debauchery and a happy celebration of an economy of desire. the women of the book who don't want to be seduced by such and such a man are "haughty" and rare, and the men are never really critiqued for their lack of invention in bed or an underabundance of tenderness, or "meager" package (as a woman's "meager bosom" is considered a defect -- I notice this criticism for not totally disinterested reasons!). a rape victim falls instantly in love with the man who attacks her, who forces "passion" upon her. I don't know... the book is written exquisitely (see again the night birds of emergency love, the parrot that squawks "every man for himself!", the ending) but I have to confess that I kept thinking where he was most romantic his verisimilitude was most questionable, and as a reader I'm not sure what to do with this.



speaking of love, I also now love the unicorn whale (narwhal whale has a unicorn horn on its head). it's at least in my top five favorite animals (mammalanimals). kualas and penguins are up there too. in a beautiful act of naming, the inuits call this whale "the one that is good at curving itself to the sky," and according to the newspaper a man named mr. rosing says, "often one can see a male and female shoot up from the water, trembling, belly to belly," which is just as pretty a description of animal love or people love for that matter as any I can most immediately think of.

now enough of all this mushiness! time for a martini and a bath!