Meh.  There's nothing inherently wrong with these stories, but I'm interminably bored -- I just may be over Allende at this point.  So, I'm just going to cash in on the 40% I've listened to and roll again.

The subtext of love and lust being equated with disease continues.

In which context, incidentally, Spanish allows the author to create nuances and allusions that are pretty much untranslatable into English or German (or even French or Italian, for that matter), by dint of the sole fact that "to love" and "to want, to desire" (in both a physical sense and otherwise) are the same word -- querer.  And he doesn't even have to use it all the time, either.

On a separate note, the German translator is skipping parts of the original text.  In chapter 3 it was only one sentence (and I did such a double take there that I reread the paragraph in question a couple of times in both Spanish and German because I initially thought I'd just missed it -- but nope, it really wasn't me), but in chapter 4 it's an entire fragment of dialogue.  In both cases, the gist of the missing stuff is incorporated (by the author himself, mind you) into another statement in close proximity, but Vicent clearly considered the extra sentence / dialogue important nevertheless, otherwise he wouldn't have included them -- so who is the translator to decide they don't merit being included in the translation?  It's one thing not to translate literally, and to play with punctuation and sentence flow in order to better convey a sense of the original.  It's another thing entirely to decide part of the text doesn't need to be translated to begin with!

Well, that escalated quickly ...

... and all that, in language (and with imagery) vaguely reminiscent of Camus's La Peste.  Hmmm ...