Uma Thurman has a line in “The Truth About Cats and Dogs” that goes something like, “I’m reading two books at the moment. The book that Brian gave us and a dictionary to understand the book that Brian gave us.”

That’s the way I’m feeling right now trying to get through “Memoria de mis putas tristes” by Gabriel García Márquez. The book is just a little over a hundred pages and yet I’ve been reading it for, god, two months now. If that’s not ridiculous I don’t know what is. I thought for sure I’d be able to get through it while in El Salvador for a couple of reasons: a) I’d have a lot of reading time and b) I’d be talking exclusively in Spanish and I thought that’d help me get into the proper mindset. While I certainly had plenty of time, the language still posed a problem. The book is riddled with words I do not understand* which, because I had no dictionary with me, I just tracked on the index card I was using as a bookmark. (Wouldn’t you know that the silly card is nowhere to be found now that I do have access to a dictionary?)

Part of me wants to give up, admit defeat and just buy the book in English, but I can’t do that. I’ve gone through this before. Several years ago, while I was reading “Santitos” by Maria Amparo Escandon, I had trouble as well. It took me nearly two years to finish that book. I’d read a chapter or two, get frustrated by my inablity to blaze through it and put it down for a couple of months. Because the story was good (and I’m all shades of stubborn) I kept going back to it, till I finished. The Christmas after I finished the book, while on a trip to El Salvador, a friend asked me if I’d been taking Spanish lessons. “No,” I said, guilty and embarrassed because I knew that I should have. “Well, something is different. Your Spanish is better.” The only thing that I could attribute the improvement to was the reading of the book.

Since then, I’ve bought quite a few books in Spanish, but being the lazybones that I am, I haven’t made any real progress on any of them. Instead I keep picking up books written in English (and even most of those I find that I’m having trouble focusing on lately). But not being able to breeze through Memoria has put me in a bad mood. Which is good because I’m just frustrated enough to get back on the horse, and am once again determined to read more books in Spanish so that both my verbal and reading comprehension skills improve. If I do this right, maybe on my next trip my friend will once again notice how I can totally rock the Spanish. Eh. At the very least, I’ll confuse less people!

For those of you not familiar with the book ... “Memoria de mis putas tristes” is the story of an aging reporter who decides to give himself a gift for his 90th birthday—a young virgin. All his life he’s only had sex with whores and has never known love, till now. He spends the night watching the naked girl sleep. Hardly what he was expecting and that night sets in place an obsession that I can only guess will last to his last days. That, however, is a guess since I’m still only 43 pages into the book. At this rate, I’ll still be reading in December! Just in time for my next Salvadoran vacation

*Then again, it is a García Márquez book. Even if I were reading it in English, I’d probably still have to read it several times to really understand all the nuances.