Rating:  Summary: More than a must read, I must re-read Review: Although I read this book four years ago, I still think about it and recommend it to anyone I think loves great literature. Unlike many people, I do not think of it so much as a "love story" as a "life story." Today we would call the "hero" a stalker. Love is so complex and involves such an evolution to fruition, that I always felt Ariza loved his own fantasy more than anything else; but he loved it completely. And in the end, he still sought to wed fantasy and reality. More moving was the brilliance of Marquez' use of language, his craft developed to the outer reaches of art. He can play the strings of emotion like a master violinist would his instrument. No John Wayne's and Darth Vadar's here. Good guys and bad guys are one and the same. These characters are rich and three dimensional, and you'll laugh and cry at the same moment. Sometimes I could only read a paragraph or two before I would have to stop and savor the richness of this work. In the fullness of time, I will read it again.
Rating:  Summary: touching story of unrequited love Review: that a friend told me about . . . very romantic, very passionate . . . beautifully written, too.
Rating:  Summary: The most romantic story of my life. Review: This book helps a person to revive the love of the other.
Rating:  Summary: A jewel of literature by a Latin American Nobel Prize. Review: The story of passionate love without limits of time, distances or age. Crowned by the City of Cartagena and framed by the Magdalena River, it depicts the patient wait, although by no means celibate, of Florentino Ariza, for his beloved woman, Fermina Daza. She had married another man. His wait, as long and crooked as the river, prepares his reappearance in the life of this old but young-hearted woman. We do not care how long because the intensity and beauty of their love make minutes, or hours, or days, or years, no matter which, barely sufficient. The translation, except for the title, is superb. Cholera is for the infectious disease not for the attitude.
Rating:  Summary: Love have no time, that is what this book is about! Review: Every since I rode this book, love had another meaning to me and I should thank Mr. Marquez for such a marvelous book. Although I know 100 years of solitude is the favorite among most people, to me this is the one. I can image somebody waiting all his life for love and I have to disagree with some people who think otherwise, sex is just a human physical necessity, love is what we found in this book. I always comment with my friends when I refer to this book about how, while reading it, I could see the colors, shapes and the places without having been there. I also have the crazy feeling that if I would have to paint a Fermina's house it would be just as Gabriel though of it! I have rode this book three times and I am waiting to forget enough to read it again!
Rating:  Summary: The most eloquently powerful love story ever written. Review: Marquez is a master of description, delving into the contents of the human heart in a way in which most of us would have thought impossible. Undoubtedly, his purpose was to put to paper the epitome of true love - the story of a man's unwavering devotion to the woman he loves and the trials they must both endure in their search for happiness. This is a book so beautifully written that if the reader is at all capable of understanding the nature of love and what it brings then Marquez's words will find an easy path into the soul of its interpreter.
Rating:  Summary: The best of Garcia Marquez, worthy of a second Nobel prize Review: A love story that reaches your soul and stirs all emotions. A must read!
Rating:  Summary: Timeless love... Review: Love has been intelectualized, written about, cried over, conceptualized, written again, so many times that one would think no love story could really impress you anymore. This has got to be one of the few exceptions. This story takes you on a timeless trip so far away into the soul, into real love and its misconceptions, its tragedies. The dream of a dream. The eternal love. The love without love and with it. A cry into the most exhausting pages of passion you will read in modern times. And inevitably you end up wondering...
Rating:  Summary: A meandering tour de force of romatic writing. Review: This work serves as an example of fine literary craftsmanship,delivering a startling message:if you do not detect resonances from the text within your own life experience,you may not yet have embraced enough of what exists to fully appreciate what it means to have lived.
Rating:  Summary: Hardly a universal love story Review: I picked up this book because I thought I should read something by this much-celebrated author, and was told that this was an easier bite to chew than jumping into 100 Years of Solitude right away. After reading nothing but glowing, laudatory reviews of this novel, I had the highest expectations. This certainly plays a role in my disappointment. I approach this book as a 17-year-old girl, and obviously much world experience is hard to come by in that length of time. I am, however, about the age that Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza were when they first fell in love and I myself have been "infatuated at first sight." And still from my perspective, their actions are foreign and nonsensical to me. It is inconceivable that a man could have 622 liaisons and yet still be "true in his heart" to one woman. On a more abstract level, I have been in love; as in love as a 17-year-old can know how to be. I remember falling into a desperate infatuation at first sight and not knowing any better than to call it love, and I know how different I felt after two years of a solid relationship. To think that I slandered the term love by using it to describe my stupid, immature, and (even more) inexperienced feelings that I possessed without even talking to him is painful for me to think about. I can only hypothesize what loving someone for 30 years would do. What strikes me most about this book is that Daza and Ariza's love seems unchanging; after 53 years they pick up where they left off and assume that each is still the same they were all those years ago. Ariza still pines for Daza with the same romantic fervor he felt as a young man--it's not that older couples don't feel passion, it's just that passion should be both tempered and enlivened by a closer bond than Ariza has. I will admit my inexperience in matters of the heart, but I do have a conception of what love is and it isn't congruent with Marquez's. 622 affairs as! ide (one with a 14-year-old girl, I might add), Ariza appears to have not matured past the lovesick, manic depressive young man who stalked Daza in the first place. I find that when I consider the issues without the aid of Marquez's romantic prose, they are much harder for me to identify with and understand.
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