A Narrator?

Still reading "Love in the Time of Cholera," and came across this sentence that intrigues me:

'As a kind of compensation from fate, it was also in the mule-drawn trolley that Florentino Ariza met Leona Cassiani, who was the true woman in his life although neither of them ever knew it and they never made love. He had sensed her before he saw her as he was going home on the trolley at five o'clock; it was a tangible look that touched him as if it were a finger. He raised his eyes and saw her, at the far end of the trolley, but standing out with great clarity from the other passengers. She did not look away. on the contrary: she continues to look at him with such boldness that he could not help thinking what he thought: black, young, pretty, but a whore beyond the shadow of a doubt. He rejected her from his life, because he could not conceive of anything more contemptible than paying for love: he had never done it.'

Firstly, I started only typing out the first sentence of the quote above but was so throughly enraptured by the resulting description that I had to copy the rest of the paragraph. Is there an omniscient narrator out there narrating all our stories? Is there an entity out there that has all our lives mapped out in front of them? I think so. I just hope not to ever be in Florentino's position...ever and if I were to end up there I think I'd rather not know.

Honestly I don't know why I picked this book up at Target back in December but I haven't read quote unquote literature in quite some time and I think this book prompts me to get back into it. To me there are some things that can only be described just so. Some of the complexities, floral, and ethereal qualities of language have been lost in time and perhaps it's only in reading, again, quote unquote great works (on who's invisible list?) that allow me to understand things and think about them in different lights. And isn't it in pondering things, circumstances, and life in general through different lenses and varying angles that make us as diverse and multifaceted as we are? It's our experiences that shape us but if we are limited in experience for whatever reason why not see what other possibilities and perspectives there are out there in the words of an artfully written novel?

I think one of the main things I like about this particular book is that you know the end before you know the beginning. Marquez tells you exactly how the love story ends within the first fifty pages. It freed me from rushing to get to the end to find out how the love story turns out. Do they end up together? Don't they? What happens? Instead I'm left to linger over the actual story for the remaining pages. I don't need to gloss or skim because I really do want to know how it all transpired. How it all came to be. How it all got so incredibly twisted.

Other choice quotes:

'Lionlady of my soul'
'"That may be the reason he does so many things," she said, "so that he will not have to think."'
'No: he would never reveal it, not even to Leona Cassiani, not because he did not want to open the chest where he had kept it so carefully hidden for half his life, but because he realized only then that he had lost the key.'
'She would defend herself, saying that love, no matter what else it might be, was a natural talent. She would say: "You are either born knowing how, or you never know."'
'She was yesterday's flower.'