The week that was #15

Love in the Time of Cholera

I actually finished this the previous week but ran out of time to write about it – so now’s going to do.

Love in the Time of Cholera, if you aren’t aware, is a novel by Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez¹. While it’s generally considered to be a lesser work than One Hundred Years of Solitude, I actually like it more.

I’m not really sure why; I believe it may be because it’s more straightforward in terms of narrative² – it’s set in what is probably Colombia and is about (mostly) two people, a boy (Florentino Ariza) and a girl (Fermina Daza) who fall in love as teenagers but, after several years of secret romance and her being exiled by her father who does not approve, she realises she doesn’t want to marry him and cuts off all communication.

He pines; she, not long after, meets and eventually marries Dr Juvenal Urbino, an eligible young man from an ‘old money’ family. Fifty years later Dr Urbino dies from a fall (chasing an unusually verbose parrot) and, the following afternoon, Florentino Ariza arrives and announces that he is still in love with Fermina Daza.

This is only the beginning; the rest of the story is about what takes place in both their lives in the intervening period – and then (briefly) what happens afterwards.

It’s not as sweet and wholesome as that description might make it sound³; after being spurned, Florentino Ariza goes on what can only be described as a lifelong nailing frenzy of epic proportions, amassing so many notches on his belt he filled several notebooks with reminiscences of his debauchery – with more than a few of them being less than appropriate, to put it mildly.

Fermina Daza, on the other hand, lives a more upright life, but she eventually realises that she does not truly love – in the romantic, idyllic sense – her husband nor he her. But they stay together anyway out of a sense of duty.

But for me it’s really less about the story and more about how it’s told – wonderful, rich prose – and what it represents, i.e. the complexity of the characters reflects so many aspects of human behaviour, particularly the behaviour of those from a culture and an era that embraced emotion and passion rather than represses it or subverts it the way today’s society does.

Oh, and for the trivia buffs – Love in the Time of Cholera has been referenced in not one but two John Cusack films: High Fidelity and Serendipity. In the former he lists it, along with The Unbearable Lightness of Being as some of the books he’s read (‘...I think I understood them. They’re about girls, right? Just kidding’) and in the latter it is a copy of it that Kate Beckinsale’s character writes her contact details in – in order to see if the universe wants them to be together - and which, years later, he finds and decides to try and track her down.

¹I hope you all appreciate the effort I go to with intonation marks.
²One Hundred Years of Solitude is a lot heavier in its use of magical realism and a vast number of characters; I think I prefer the (relative) naturalism and simplicity of ‘Cholera’.
³García Márquez, in an interview, described that aspect of it as a ‘trap’, and stressed that the story is far more complex; however, this is still how most people think of the book.

42nd Street

I’d never seen 42nd Street before; I was under the impression that it was a) an old-timey musical and b) one that got put on a lot because its popularity, but it turns out I was wrong on both counts – it appeared on Broadway in 1980 and no-one that I’m aware of has been in production of it.

While it’s very much a fluff piece – good-hearted girl from the sticks overcomes adversity to make it good in musical theatre– it’s enjoyable, fun stuff with some great song-and-dance numbers.

It’s something important to remember about theatre – different shows exist for different purposes. This is very important to me as a reviewer, because I can’t go to something bleak (say, The Crucible) and complain that they didn’t at any point make me laugh. Likewise, I can’t go to a ‘whoops where’s my trousers?’ style British farce and moan about how there was no social commentary or that I didn’t learn anything from it – well, other than to not cheat on my wife with a mistress who will, after I upset her greatly by ending our illicit affair, turn out to also be the girlfriend of my wife’s humourless boss – the boss who’s coming to dinner at our house the very same evening and who my highly-strung wife insists will give her the big promotion if everything goes well.

Say, there might be something in that...

A Theatrical Leave of Absence

Tempest starts next week (details here – yes, it’s shameless plugging; live with it) and I’m taking two weeks off work while it’s on. It’s not something everyone does (if they have the option), but for me it’s been fairly standard practice since I started working full-time with paid leave.

There are number of reasons for this.

One reason is that on weeknights I generally go to bed early in order to get plenty of sleep since I find that work is onerous enough as it is, and it’s most certainly not made any less so by being tired.

Theatre, of course, is a nighttime activity; amateur shows, at least in Adelaide, almost always start at 8pm⁴. A typical show will last between two and three hours, meaning that the earliest we’re evening contemplating getting out of the theatre is after 10pm – and often much later – which is a problem for me because on every weeknight I can manage it I’m in bed before 11.

But that’s only the half of it; the other is how hard I find it to ‘come down’ after a show. I have enough trouble getting to sleep as it is; the way I tend to describe it is that I don’t ‘fall’ asleep as much as ‘am pushed by sheer force of will’. The key to a good theatrical performance is energy, so to do what’s needed on stage I have to get about as alert as I can get and it takes time for that to wear off. If you throw some kind of post-show celebration on top of that then it’s likely I wouldn’t be in bed before midnight and almost certainly wouldn’t be asleep for another hour after that – at best.

To spend close to two weeks getting less sleep than I’d prefer, and compounding that tiredness and the inevitable irritability that comes with it⁵ is not something I’d choose if I had the option. But I did have the option, and that brings me to reason number two: a surfeit of leave.

Because I don’t take actual holidays – the packing and travelling kind - very often and I’ve been a permanent employee (i.e. one who gets four weeks paid leave each year) for something like four years now, the leave I’ve earned⁶ has been building up – yes, I do the theatre leave pretty much every time I do a show, but I haven’t been doing that many shows – two a year at most – and I don’t always take the two weeks I’m taking this time around.

So, prior to taking these two weeks, I’d built up over eight weeks worth of leave – and this, apparently, is something management frowns upon. So, the orders came from up high to get my accumulation down below the eight-week maximum. It was never mentioned what the consequences of not taking leave would be, but I’m sure a vicious sack-beating could have been involved.

And now I’ve got myself two weeks’ worth of sleeping in and being baffled by the awfulness of daytime television. Oh, and writing blog stuff – I’ve got specific posts about Tempest and the new netbook and its conversion from Windows to Ubuntu to do – plus watching some of the backlog on my DVR’s hard drive (I’m going to have a marathon of the remaining Lost episodes once the finale has aired), rearranging things in my house, learning about the aforementioned Ubuntu, going to the gym as much as possible (potential ill health permitting – there’s a good chance I’ll get sick because of the show) and reading a few books.

Oh, and do two previews and eight proper performances of Tempest. Good times!

⁴This isn’t universal; some companies have 7.30 as their standard start time, and then there are things like matinees (early afternoon) and twilight performances (late afternoon/early evening).
⁵I’m sure I’ve mentioned in at least one previous post that being tired makes me grumpy – and that’s probably putting it politely.
⁶That might be using the term loosely. Perhaps I should have written ‘acquired’.