Fog and stuff.

When I got up this morning, the world outside had disappeared. The cloud had come down and covered everything. It was not just raining, the cloud was almost palpable. This is what happens around here and it can happen at any time of year. The only difference is the temperature of the descended cloud. Today it was rather low, this being March. 

Eeyore in the bread shop told me it was set for the day but, although it came and went in varying degrees of obscurity all morning, by mid afternoon it had more or less gone. There were still clouds but they were back up in the sky where they belonged and the sun was managing to shine a little. 

Just as well, as I needed to return my library books and a walk in the rain was not what I had in mind. 

I have been having a South American thing going on with my reading. First there was García Márquez and "Love in the time of Cholera", which I have almost certainly read before and which I mostly enjoyed reading again. As I approached the end, however, I almost set it aside unfinished. The protagonist, Florentino Ariza, waiting for the love of his youth, the love of his life, Fermina Daza, to be free to realise that she should love only him, has a series of dalliances, almost love affairs, with a surprising number of other women. This is fine; you accept it as part of the storyline. And then, the very last of his list of lady loves turns out to be a fifteen year old girl. By this time he is a man in his late seventies and the affair leaves a bad taste in this reader's mouth. I wonder if García Márquez would include the schoolgirl América Vicuña in his tale if he were writing it now and not at the end of the 1970s. 

My other library find was a much more recent book, this time by Isabel Allende, published in 2011, "El Cuaderno de Maya". This is the story of a recovering addict and alcoholic hiding away from drug-pushing, money laundering counterfeiters and the FBI in the island of Chiloé off the bottom of Chile. As Maya comes to terms with herself, she discovers, and reveals to us, details of the disturbing past of some of her family in the Pinochet years in Chile. Quite readable, the book, with its series of flashbacks gradually unfolding more and more of the story, had me wondering if it was written with a possible film in mind, as so many books are these days. 

Well, that's my Spanish reading over for a while. There was little point in getting more from the library as we head back to the UK on Monday. Time to see what I have lurking unread on my kindle. But now at I have discovered the improved arrangements at the library here, I shall go back on our next visit.