OMG OMG OMG

My phone interview with North Star is tomorrow. North Star Academy is a charter school in Newark, and it looks fabulous. 11 month instructional year, novel-based approach to teaching, they actually teach grammar (!!!!!), and a 100% college acceptance rate. Hell, we didn't have that at my high school.

But...they do seem very exclusive and picky about who they select. My chances aren't good, all things considered, and I'm extremely nervous, but here's hoping. (Translation: panic, panic, panic, panic. Interspersed with panic. With the occasional bout of mind ravaging panic.)

On a happier note, I'm actually reading again (and trying to write about the books.) I finished Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and...eh. The book is an excellent argument for more ruthless copy editors.

It would have been a great short story cycle or trilogy of novels. Marquez creates a wonderful, fairy-tale-like atmosphere and a matching love story. However...it goes on for over 200 pages, but not long enough to actually explore any of the topics he kicks up. There are three distinct parts, and I am completely at a loss for why Marquez did not chop it into three distinct stories and take his time telling them. Hell, if he was bent on an overarching saga, he could have done it that way via entire novels. As is, though, he glossed over interesting things and added entirely too much mundane nonsense in his quixotic determination to pack EVERY DETAIL of three lives into one novel. It was too vague, too confused, and either entirely too long or far too short.

The basic premise of the story is that two teenagers, Fermina and Florentino, fall in love. Fermina's dad is not amused when he finds out, and so he ships her off to live with cousins in the middle of nowhere. Fermina and Florentino manage to write letters for a few years and plan to marry. Unfortunately, when Fermina gets back to the city, she realizes she doesn't actually love the man. She loves the idea of Florentino rather than the person. So she dumps him immediately.

She then catches the eye of her doctor, who marries her, though neither of them is in love. They're very frank about this, at least with themselves, but never discuss it with one another. They marry without really getting to know one another, which leads to some of the better parts of the book. (Wedding night and honeymoon: They spend the nights talking, because the doctor realizes Fermina's panicking at the idea of dealing with him in a non-crowd setting. He takes a couple nights to get her used to the idea of being alone with him before actually doing anything.)

The middle part of the book is the best; even though the book is a flashback from the husband's funeral, he and Fermina were a more interesting couple. I really wish Marquez took more time exploring their relationship. For example, they only fought once. It was over soap. Of course, by that time, the soap was a metaphor for all the repressed anger in the relationship, and so the doctor tried never to mention soap again, lest the argument restart.

Marquez could have done so much with the way the couple denies affection, avoids arguments, avoids sensitive subjects, and maintains their lovingly passive-aggressive relationship. Instead, he spends innumerable pages talking about the pet parrot, Florentino's innumerable affairs, Fermina's hatred of eggplant, and every other extraneous topic on the planet, right down to whether minor characters are wearing underwear. (I'm not kidding. Apparently, nervous, married men prefer fluffy skirts and no underwear because it makes them feel as though they're saving time and can get back home faster. This was a two page discussion.) Marquez even goes into riverboat signals. Yes, most of these things are (at least somewhat tangetially) connected to the plot, but really? Really? Are they necessary at the expense of other details?

The simple answer is no, they're not. And the lack of coherent character building makes the characters almost unlikeable. By the end of the book, the characters are still strangers. That may be a metaphor for relationships, but it's poorly done. The minor characters felt far more fleshed out and consistent than the important ones.

By the time the end of the book (finally) rolls around, Fermina's husband is dead and Florentino has proposed again. The reader no longer cares or likes the characters, though there's a very interesting book about old people in love lurking in there somewhere.

I'm really disappointed, all in all. Marquez is a good author; he knows better. Yes, some of the problems may be due to translation issues, but still. The pacing is awful, the characters suck, and the engrossing, all-encompassing love story...isn't. At all. I really liked the interloper husband the best out of the characters. This book is one of those "classics" that gets grandfathered into the canon because the author wrote some legitimately awesome other stuff. That, for the record, pisses me off. If a book is good, it's good. If it's not, it's not. If Shakespeare had written the tripe you find in Hallmark cards as well as his sonnets, people would praise the greeting cards as masterpieces, coming up with nonsensical reasons to justify quasi-poetic tripe as classic literature.

People can do it with other media, why not books? Look at movies. Is anyone going to say that Gigli was the same caliber movie as Good Will Hunting? Oh, but they both have Ben Aflek! So...they're both good, right? If we can make that (extremely obvious) distinction for movies, music, and the like, why not literature? Yes, it's hard to be the guy who calls a "great master of literary blahblah" on his crap book, but if it's true...why not admit it?