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Like anyone who reads Marquez, I was stunned by the prose, even as translated. He is possibly the greatest living writer, an expert at conjuring an earler time and far away place and making it seem very real.
However, I was deeply disturbed by Cholera, more so than by his other works. His everyday matter of factness when writing about his "hero"s pedophilia, promiscuity and incest were most troubling to someone with my early 21st Century sensibilities. Presenting this character as a moral exemplar of some sort of rare and all consuming love made me squirm and I felt that even as an example of the realtivity of moral values it went a bit far. It has always seemed to me to represent what is in fact wrong with the latinate cultures. The "hero" objectifies women, whether it's the exagerated "resepct" for the love object or the degredation and disregard shown for the neice. Neither is seen as human.
I haven't seen the movie, and now of course I won't see it. In fairness it seems to me that there may not have been any way to capture the thought provoking aspects of the novel in a form that would be remotely acceptable to contemporaries. Marquez, put simply, may be unfilmable at presemt.
