Part 1:                                                                                   

1.In 1948, when she was 27 years old, Patricia Highsmith took a job as a salesgirl in the toy section of a Manhattan department store. One morning, blondish woman in a fur coat" came in to buy a doll for her daughter. After the transaction, Highsmith felt "odd and swimmy in the head, near to fainting, at the same time uplifted." That night, she wrote an eight-page outline of her only love story, a novel that captures all the giddiness of that initial bouleversement. Rejected by her original publisher and later issued under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, the book became a lesbian cult classic, sold a million copies in its first year in paperback and was turned into the entrancing 2015 film "Carol." The book is written in a deceptively simple declarative style, where the complexity of falling in love, when one is both elated and afraid, appears both natural and inevitable. "Whatever happened, they would meet it without running." Highsmith's work often starts with a simple premise (think

"Strangers on a Train" or "The Talented Mr.

Ripley) that develops into something seriously out of control. Here, there is all the balanced simplicity of unstoppable love.

2. Set in an unnamed Caribbean city in the late 19th century, this is a lyrical comedy of patience rewarded. Florentino Ariza, a young telegraph operator, is considered too lowly to marry the radiantly beautiful Fermina Daza. Forced apart by the girl's father, the couple are separated for 51 years, nine months and four days. In that time, Fermina marries the well-respected Juvenal Urbino and Florentino contents himself with 622 affairs and one-night stands while dreaming of his beloved. He goes bald, loses his teeth and waits for his rival to die. Gabriel García Marquez sets the ridiculous nature of his hero's plight against the absurdities of church and state and suffuses the novel with wit, generosity and grace. To read it is to experience sensory overload; a heady infusion of orange blossom, camellia, bitter almonds and the asparagus-scented urine with which Dr. Urbino waters his garden. The couple do, of course, get there in the end. When they are finally reunited, "it was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. .. beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion:

beyond love."