The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Gabriel García Márquez · a novel in six untitled, unnumbered chapters · first published December 1985 · scored on García Márquez’s Spanish, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Spanish quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close English beneath and Edith Grossman’s translation (1988) for sense
Mode
The realist novel of love and marriage in the manner of the nineteenth century, comic and elegiac at once, opened at the end and told back to it
Mythos
The lover sworn to one woman across a lifetime, from the courtly tradition and the romance of chivalry; Penelope’s wait given to a man; the river as the passage between life and death; love as a sickness with the symptoms of cholera
Phase
Some fifty years, from the courtship of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza through her marriage to Dr Juvenal Urbino and his death, to the widowhood and the voyage on the river; the book withholds most dates
Presentation
Fiction; six untitled, unnumbered chapters of broadly similar length in the third person; the first a single day, the second to the fifth a return of half a century, the sixth the widowhood and the voyage; long paragraphs with little dialogue set apart; the narration passes among Florentino, Fermina, Urbino and the town’s gossip
Register
Long, balanced, periodic Spanish, comic in its exactness and elegiac in its rhythm, telling farce, suicide, plague and tenderness with the same ironic warmth
Scale
Three lives and a city: two loves across half a century, a family’s climb, a river company, a port in decay and a river stripped of its forests
Governing Proposition
On a single Pentecost Sunday an old man kills himself rather than grow old, a great doctor falls from a ladder in pursuit of his parrot and dies in his wife’s sight, and at the end of the funeral a man of the same age tells the widow that he has kept faith with her for fifty-one years, nine months and four days. The book then goes back half a century and runs forward to that day: a courtship by letters and its refusal, a marriage made without passion that becomes a partnership, and a life of hidden affairs counted in notebooks, until the widow and the lover go up the river together on a boat that flies the cholera flag so that it need never put in. The wager of the novel is that love in the old body is the substance of love and not its end, that a marriage and a lifelong passion are two loves the book need not rank, and that the faithful lover can be honoured and judged in the same even voice.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Era inevitable: el olor de las almendras amargas le recordaba siempre el destino de los amores contrariados.”
“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” The first sentence sets the key of the whole book: fate, a smell, and an irony that does not yet declare itself. The bitter almonds belong to poison, and the sentence opens on a death chosen. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour has killed himself rather than grow old, and his corpse is the book’s first figure of age.
The first chapter is a single Pentecost Sunday. On the same day Dr Juvenal Urbino, the city’s great physician, climbs a ladder into the mango tree after his escaped parrot, falls, and dies in his wife’s sight, with last words for her. The scene is farce and grandeur at once, and it is told with the same exact, unhurried comedy as everything else in the book. Then comes the funeral.
At the funeral’s end, that night, Florentino Ariza, a man of the widow’s age, declares to Fermina Daza the fidelity he has kept for “cincuenta y un años, nueve meses y cuatro días”
“fifty-one years, nine months and four days”. The figure is given to the day. The reader is placed at the end before the beginning: a suicide who refused age, a marriage closed by death, a love declared at the edge of the grave. Everything that follows is the long road back to that night.
Movement II
The second chapter goes back some fifty years. Florentino, young, falls in love with Fermina, and the first diagnosis of his condition, by his mother and the doctor, is that his lovesickness looks like cholera. The book’s figure is set there: love has the symptoms of a disease, and the disease is the history of the city as well, for the cholera is real in its streets and on its river.
The courtship runs on letters. Florentino works in the telegraph office, and the love passes through it; at night he plays the violin in the cemetery for her. These scenes have the lift of the romances they imitate, and the narration lets them have it, while the city around the lovers goes on with its commerce and its caste. Fermina’s father, Lorenzo Daza, has a fortune of doubtful origin, and the family is climbing.
Then the courtship ends. In the market Fermina sees Florentino close, and refuses him. The refusal is given in a moment of seeing, and the book does not argue it; it lets it stand as the event on which half a century turns. She will marry Dr Juvenal Urbino, of an old name in the city; Florentino will wait.
Movement III
The marriage of Fermina and Urbino is made without passion, and the book follows it for fifty years with as much attention as it gives the passion that was refused. It becomes a real partnership and a daily contest. The quarrel over the soap in the bathroom is the book’s anatomy of marriage: in one small grievance, the whole economy of two people bound to each other.
Urbino is a public man. His campaign against cholera, the drains and the aqueduct, makes him the city’s physician in more than name, and through him the book holds medicine and public health, the old families and the decay of a colonial port. His civic life is given in the same even cadence as his marriage and his death.
The narration passes freely between Fermina and Urbino and the town’s gossip, so that no single heart owns the story. The book does not rank this love below the other. Told from Florentino’s side alone, the marriage would be an obstacle; told as the book tells it, it is one of the two loves the novel is about, and it ends only on the ladder in the mango tree.
Movement IV
While he waits, Florentino rises in the River Company of the Caribbean, in the river trade of his uncle Leo XII Loayza. The clerk becomes a shipping magnate, and the knight of the romance is a man of business.
He is faithful in the heart and in nothing else. His notebooks record six hundred and twenty-two long affairs, not counting the passing ones: the widow Nazaret, Ausencia Santander, Sara Noriega, Leona Cassiani, Olimpia Zuleta among them. The faithful lover is a compulsive seducer, and the book tells his affairs as episodes, comic and exact, so that the catalogue grows beside the one fidelity it is set against. Olimpia Zuleta is murdered by her husband for the words Florentino painted on her belly, and the narration absorbs it.
Then there is América Vicuña, a girl of fourteen placed in his care, whom he leaves for the widow, and who kills herself. Her death is told in the same supple cadence as everything else. That is the book’s hardest judgment and its cost at once: the voice withholds the weight, and leaves the reader to feel it. The romance and its price stand side by side, and the book does not choose between them.
Movement V
The sixth chapter returns to the widowhood. Two old people approach each other slowly, and the book does not make the old body grotesque or comic: it dwells on the smell of age and the slack skin, and on the failed first night in the cabin, and treats them as the substance of love, not its end.
They go up the river together on a river boat. The forests along the river are gone and its manatees with them; the cholera corpses and the war are glimpsed from the deck and kept at a distance. A yellow flag is raised, the sign of cholera on board, so that the boat may go on and never put in. The plague that gave the book its first figure for love now gives the lovers their freedom from the city.
The captain asks how long they can keep going up and down the river, and the answer is “Toda la vida”
“For the rest of our lives”. The book’s last count is “cincuenta y tres años, siete meses y once días con sus noches”
“fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights”, Florentino’s tally from the start of his love. The book that opened on an old man who would not grow old ends on two who go on, outside the city and outside time, and the count that measured the waiting becomes the measure of the end.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required. Opening on the day of Urbino’s death and Florentino’s declaration, then going back half a century, makes the reader hold the end while the middle accumulates, so that the last chapter’s voyage is paid for by everything between. The suicide of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour is not ornament: an old man who chose death rather than age frames two old people who choose love in age. What holds the axis there is the catalogue at the centre. The middle chapters on Florentino’s affairs proceed by episode, the widow Nazaret, Ausencia Santander, Sara Noriega, Olimpia Zuleta, Leona Cassiani, and several could go without loss to the argument; some of Urbino’s civic chapters are period colour. The catalogue is partly the point, six hundred and twenty-two entries set against one fidelity, but the book’s scale is permitted more than compelled in its fourth and fifth chapters. Necessity is strong in the frame and the last chapter, looser in between.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Three disclosures, and each holds. That love has the symptoms of a disease: the first diagnosis, by Florentino’s mother and the doctor, is that his lovesickness looks like cholera, and the book shows love as many things and not one. That it continues into the old body, which the book refuses to make grotesque or comic: the sixth chapter dwells on the smell of age, the slack skin, the failed first night in the cabin, and treats them as the substance of love. That a marriage made without passion can become over fifty years a real partnership and a daily contest, so that the book discloses two kinds of love and refuses to rank them. A third disclosure runs against its hero: Florentino’s fidelity of the heart stands beside his six hundred and twenty-two affairs and the ruin of América Vicuña, a girl in his care who kills herself when he leaves her for the widow. The romance and its cost stand side by side; that is a meaning, not a mood. What holds the axis there is how much weight the reader lets the irony bear; the book clears the bar, not by much.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The register is warm, comic and elegiac, and the book rises often within it. Urbino’s death is farce and grandeur at once: the great doctor up a ladder in the mango tree after the parrot, and his last words to his wife. The young Florentino playing the violin at night in the cemetery for Fermina, and the love that runs on letters through a telegraph office, have the lift of the romances they imitate. The last chapter is the height: the slow approach of two old people, the river stripped of its forests and its manatees, the yellow flag raised so that the boat may go on and never put in, and the last answer, “Toda la vida”
“For the rest of our lives”. What holds the axis there is that its elevation is of beauty and tenderness, frequent but rarely overwhelming; there is no terror or grandeur on the scale of the massacre in Blood Meridian or the station in Anna Karenina, and the cholera itself, the corpses in the river and the war glimpsed from the boat, is kept at a distance.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The archetype is built in, not evoked. The lover sworn to one woman across a lifetime comes from the courtly tradition and the romance of chivalry: Tristan’s fidelity carried through an ordinary bourgeois life, and Penelope’s wait given to a man, who weaves his affairs while he waits. The river is built into the ending as the passage between life and death, a boat that will go up and down under a plague flag, outside the city and outside time. The bitter almonds, the poisons, the parrot, and the cholera as both history and figure make a set of signs that recur. What holds the axis below the gate is the irony that runs at every step: the faithful lover is a compulsive seducer, the knight is a clerk who rises to own a shipping company. The irony is deliberate, but it keeps the myth at arm’s length, and the book’s people stay particular and comic rather than taking on the weight of the founders and the doomed line of the author’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Built, and well built, but not the deepest.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The departure was real, and risky in its moment. After One Hundred Years of Solitude had made his manner the emblem of a continent’s fiction, García Márquez wrote a novel of love and marriage in the manner of the nineteenth century, close to the serial romance and to Flaubert, with almost none of the marvellous, at the height of his fame and against the expectation of the Boom that the serious Latin American novel was a novel of history, dictators and formal experiment. The stake was sentimentality and the charge of retreat, and the book took it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that this is in large part a wager placed on a proven path. The forms it turns to, the realist love novel, the family chronicle, the circular frame, are old and secure; the swerve is from the author’s own manner and his field’s fashion, not from the possibilities of the novel. What it adds of its own, a comic seriousness about old age and a double love story without a ranking, is a turn within the tradition, not out of it.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The form carries the knowledge. Because the book begins at the end of fifty years, the reader waits as Florentino waits, and the long middle is felt as duration: the scale is the content, a love measured in years, months and days, and the counts in the text, “cincuenta y un años, nueve meses y cuatro días”
“fifty-one years, nine months and four days”, are the book’s own measure. The narration passes freely among Florentino, Fermina, Urbino and the town’s gossip, in long paragraphs with little dialogue set apart, so that no single heart owns the story and the two loves are given equal weight. Told in Florentino’s first person it would be a seducer’s apology; told in Fermina’s it would lose the irony that judges him. The circle from Pentecost to the river and back to the counted years makes the ending a return. What holds the axis there is that the frame is a familiar device, and the middle’s episodic form is the container of a catalogue, not its instrument; changing it would cost less than changing the form of Anna Karenina or Infinite Jest.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Forty years of reading have not settled the central question: is the book a love story, or a study of a self-deceiving man who calls obsession constancy? The episode of América Vicuña, a girl of fourteen in Florentino’s charge, has become the hinge of recent readings, and the book bears both: its tenderness is real, and its indictment is in the text, not imposed on it. The marriage of Fermina and Urbino yields differently at each age of the reader, and the book’s treatment of age and the body, of public health and the decay of the Caribbean city, and of the river as a ruined ecology have each been taken up in their turn. The return yields in the prose too, where comic precision hides judgment. What holds the axis there is the book’s lucidity: its ironies are graspable on a second reading, and it does not open the depth of interpretation that the author’s earlier book or the greatest novels sustain. The evidence of return is good, not inexhaustible.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The field is the novel in Spanish of the later twentieth century. The force: the book claimed the love story, and love in old age, as subjects for the most serious novel at a time when the Latin American novel of prestige was a novel of history and form, and showed that the realist romance could carry irony, politics, the civil wars, the cholera and the river’s ruin, and moral judgment without abandoning feeling. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book stands at the start of the turn in Spanish American fiction of the later 1980s and 1990s toward accessible, emotional storytelling sometimes called the post-Boom, beside Isabel Allende; and it fixed the long-delayed love of the old as a recognisable form in world fiction. What holds the axis there is that the reach is real but diffuse. It is not the reorganisation that One Hundred Years of Solitude effected, and no major later work can be named with certainty as plainly its descendant. Strong force, moderate reach.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Forty-one years since publication, and presence of the widest kind. The novel has been continuously in print since 1985 in Spanish and since 1988 in Edith Grossman’s English, is taught, was filmed in 2007 (a weak film, which is presence only), and is among the most read novels in Spanish of its decade; fame and sales are presence, not proof. Its surface is not fixed to its moment. It was already a period book when written, set in a past the author cast in the manner of an older novel, and nothing topical dates it. What holds the axis there is the span: forty-one years is not survival in the sense the elder books have it, and the case rests on presence that is continuous and international rather than on outlasting the conditions that raised it. The axis stands where four decades of the widest presence can put it, and no higher.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Judged on the Spanish, the command is near the summit of the novel in that language in its century. The sentences are long, balanced and periodic, comic in their exactness and elegiac in their rhythm, and they move a whole life in a clause; the opening sentence sets the book’s key of fate, smell and irony at once. The management of time is masterly: fifty years compressed and dilated without confusion, gossip and interior life folded into one narration, and the set pieces, the death of Urbino, the funeral, the voyage, built with a dramatist’s control. The comedy is precise and never breaks the elegy. What holds the axis below the top is the uniformity of the manner across six hundred affairs and fifty years. Its smoothness sometimes glides where it should cut: the death of América Vicuña is told in the same supple cadence as a dinner party, which is the point, but also a cost; and the middle’s episodes are made with less tension than the frame. A step below Anna Karenina and Blood Meridian.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the farthest elements: the farce of the parrot and the ladder, and the suicide of a fourteen-year-old girl; the serenade in the cemetery and the cholera corpses in the river; the bourgeois comedy of the soap and the plague flag at the end. One law governs them all: a narration that tells everything with the same ironic tenderness and lets the reader feel the weight the voice withholds. It holds across fifty years and across the three principal consciousnesses. What holds the axis there is that the even voice that makes the law also narrows the range. The book does not admit tragedy at full strength, and where it brushes it, with América Vicuña, or with Olimpia Zuleta, murdered by her husband for the words Florentino painted on her belly, the law holds by absorbing the event, not by rising to it. The range is wide and the coherence real, but the coherence is partly the coherence of a single tone.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Held through two lives, not listed. Two inner lives across fifty years, and a third beside them; a marriage, a family and its social climb, with Lorenzo Daza’s fortune of doubtful origin set against the Urbino family’s old name and the city’s caste; labour and commerce, the telegraph office, the River Company of the Caribbean and Uncle Leo XII Loayza; medicine and public health, Urbino’s campaign against cholera, the drains and the aqueduct; the civil wars glimpsed from the river; the decay of a colonial port; the destruction of the forests and animals of the Magdalena; the church, death and burial; age and the body. Commerce, public health, class and the river’s ecology are the conditions of the plot, not its scenery. What holds the axis there is that the state, history and the sacred are background, not orders the book weighs as it weighs love: it holds a society, not a world, and encompasses less than Anna Karenina or Infinite Jest.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.9, then The Imperishable at 8.7, The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 8.6. A Spanish of long, balanced sentences that move a whole life in a clause and hold fifty years without confusion; four decades of continuous presence for a book that nothing topical dates; a double disclosure of love, the passion and the marriage, given unranked, with the old body taken as love’s substance and the hero judged in the text; and one ironic, tender voice that governs the parrot, the plague flag and the death of a child.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 8.0: a departure from the author’s own manner and his field’s fashion into old and secure forms, a wager placed largely on a proven path. Next above it, The Inevitable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2: a catalogue of affairs at the centre permitted more than compelled; and a force that claimed love in old age for the serious novel, with a reach that is real but diffuse.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Unconcealment at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.3, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 and The Swerve at 8.0 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Swerve at 8.0, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.5. The aggregate, 8.5, holds the work in Tier IV of itself; the unmet gate would hold it there in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Gabriel García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera, first published in December 1985. The unit scored is the novel as published, in Spanish and complete: six untitled, unnumbered chapters, the first a single Pentecost Sunday, the second to the fifth a return of some fifty years run forward to it, the sixth the widowhood and the voyage on the river. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured by script, and no quotation was checked against a file. The plot, the structure, the principal scenes and the manner are known closely; the Spanish sentences are known only in a handful of phrases. Every axis is judged on García Márquez’s Spanish. Spanish is quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own close rendering beneath: the opening sentence, the two counts of years, months and days, and the last answer, “Toda la vida”. Everything else is paraphrased, including Urbino’s last words and the words with which Fermina ends the courtship. The number of Florentino’s affairs is given as the book gives it; its exact phrasing is not. Citations are by episode and by chapter in order, since the chapters have no numbers or titles. Translation · Edith Grossman’s English (Knopf, 1988), the translation the desk knows best, read for sense; it is not quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the novel. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the first publishers, the length in pages and words, whether the book carries an epigraph, the years the story spans, the episode of the balloon flight, the number of languages of translation, and which later novels stand in its company.