love-in-the-time-of-cholera
The best thing about "Love in the Time of Cholera" is its rich and poetic prose, which beautifully captures the complexities of love and the passage of time. Reviewers often praise Gabriel García Márquez's ability to create vivid characters and their emotional depth. On the other hand, the worst aspect noted by some reviewers is the slow pacing of the narrative, which can make it challenging for readers to stay engaged. Some felt that the storyline meanders, leading to a lack of tension in certain parts of the book.
Plot & Themes
What made it stick: A novel about love that takes the long view — fifty years long — and insists that obsessive, irrational, unreciprocated love is as real and as worthy of serious treatment as the comfortable, companionate kind. García Márquez writes old age and desire without condescension or comedy.
The plot: Florentino Ariza falls devastatingly in love with Fermina Daza as a teenager. She returns his affection briefly, then dismisses him after seeing him clearly for the first time. She marries the distinguished Dr. Juvenal Urbino and lives a full, if not entirely happy, life with him for fifty years. Florentino waits. When Urbino dies, Florentino — now in his seventies — declares his love again. The novel follows what happens next, on a river journey that is also a meditation on what love becomes over a lifetime.
What it’s about:
- Love as obsession and as patience — Florentino’s fifty-year fidelity is simultaneously romantic and pathological, and García Márquez refuses to resolve the ambiguity
- The difference between the love you choose and the love you can’t escape — Fermina’s marriage is rational, dignified, and genuine; Florentino’s devotion is none of these things and is also genuine
- Old age as a territory with its own rules — the novel’s most radical move is treating the elderly characters’ desire and vulnerability with complete seriousness; their bodies are failing while their inner lives remain as complex and urgent as ever
- The cholera/love equation — love’s symptoms in the novel are indistinguishable from cholera’s: fever, nausea, obsession, the sense of dying; the metaphor runs throughout
- Memory and time as distorting lenses — what Florentino has loved for fifty years is a woman who ceased to exist shortly after he met her; the novel asks whether that matters
— Drafted from external sources; review and edit to make your own.
Kindle Highlights: Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International)
Highlights
The only consolation, even for someone like him who had been a good man in bed, was sexual peace: the slow, merciful extinction of his venereal appetite. — location: 708 ^ref-19070
examinations at the Hôpital de la Sulpêtrière, where he had been an intern. It was an arduous but fruitless effort. However, when they least expected it, and with no scientific intervention, the miracle occurred. When they returned home, Fermina was in the sixth month of her pregnancy and thought herself the happiest woman on earth. — location: 2687 ^ref-28931