This is Gary’s special edition Thanksgiving blog!

Note: For this this blog entry, I will speak…sorry…Gary will speak of himself in the third person.

Note (again): Addressing myself in third person was extremely tiresome, so I gave up. Just wanted you to know that I was going to do it.

Love in the time of Cholera is an uplifting, wonderful story about the delights of first and true love…not. It’s depressing and frightening…and quite dark. It appears to be about the neverending hope and eternal happiness supplied by true love, but in reality we soon discover that it faithfully describes neverending hope… and the subsequent neverending hopelessness. Instead of filling our hearts with hope of a chance for true and unimaginable, unrealistic love, it smashes our dreams and tears our hope into shreds with it’s sudden shift to the stereotype of realistic love and marriage. Never has the void in me that I sometimes pretend holds emotion and sentimentality been torn as it was by Fermina’s rejection of Florentino.

It’s not so much that I felt for Florentino as I felt for myself. I had committed hours of my time to reading the hundred or so pages that led up to this event. I had invested my time, which could have been spent playing FIFA or Guitar Hero, in this book believing that I was working toward a final solution to this fifty page obsession that was Florentino and Fermina’s verbal fling, but I was wrong. Dead wrong. Or very seriously wrong, at least.

I know that the book started at the end of Urbino’s life and that we knew that Fermina and the doctor get together but I didn’t know it happened like this. When so many tragic stories end with forced marriage breaking up a physical connection but leaving an eternal love intact, I didn’t expect this one to break apart in a sudden change of heart on the behalf of the hot girl. That’s not uplifting. That is devastating. Yes, devastating (and I mean the total destruction, nothing left, nuclear winter, Sherman’s march to the sea devastating). Who cares if the star-crossed lover is devastated. I am devastated. All of my attention and effort was wasted on an ending that I would have guessed from the get go. My outlook on life was not changed by Fermina’s rejection. It was sadly confirmed. If every story ended like this one, glasses would always be served half empty and the terrorists would probably be waiting for me at home.

I mean the happy ending is an archetype for a reason. Real life ends like this book does. And real life sucks. Why would I waste my actual life reading about a realistic ending. I could just watch the news. Go on, call it great literature. I call a perversion of the human spirit.