Love in the Time of Cholera

Rating:
Summary: Tender and wonderful.
Review: Whereas 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is filled with love both unclean and forbidden 'Love in the Time of Cholera' only specifically deals with two love affairs, both of which are long, highly unusual and inherently sad. Also, unlike 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', it is clearly the overwhelming power of true love which emerges as by far the most prominent theme of the novel. Set in the boiling, tense heat of an anonymous Colombian seaport reminiscent of Cartagena, the novel concerns Florentino Ariza, owner of a riverboat company and his intense yet futile love for Fermina Daza, a wealthy and beautiful child initially naive in the ways of love. At first this love is expressed via heartfelt letters which seems to burn the very soul of both participants. But after a trip away from the city, which Fermina's Father arranges largely in an attempt to make Fermina forget Florentino, of whom he does not approve, Fermina realises she does not in fact love Florentino, and promptly rejects him. He on the other hand secretly carries this unrequited love for her for over half a century. After rejecting Florentino, Fermina embarks upon a 'Marriage of convenience' to the highly esteemed Dr. Juvenal Urbino, leaving Florentino spending much of his time going from one to another of his six hundred and twenty two erotic assignations (which makes him one of the most highly sexed characters in literary history!), yet never finding fulfillment and longing for Fermina. But, as we can guess from the novels beginning, in which Juvenal Urbino dies tragically (much of the novel is told in the form of a flashback), Florentino and Fermina do find happiness, although in an unusual fashion.
Although love is such an important theme in the novel that it underpins almost everything that happens, Marquez muses upon many facets of life here: old age, decay and the human condition are all adressed, tenderly and using comparisons so deeply ingrained into the human psyche that the author's meaning is always apparent. This, above all else, is the genius of Marquez. When Florentino remarks at the novels end that 'Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity' Marquez implies that just as human life has been ravaged by the cholera plague of the title, so the soul of Florentino has been stripped bare by love. In 'Love in the Time of Cholera' Marquez makes it clear nothing is lasting, neither youth nor life., along with spinning out a flawless love story that seems to flow off the page with all the grace the mans writing possesses.
An intelligent, thoughtful and complex book, which goes far beyond a love story.
Once again, Marquez produces an undisputed classic, which any fan of literature can hardly afford not to own.

Rating:
Summary: More love than cholera
Review: How long can a man hold out for a woman? The duration of the love triangle in "Love in the Time of Cholera" is well over half a century, and for the novel's protagonist as well as for its readers, patience is most richly rewarded. There is little of the magic realism that was the chief characteristic of Garcia Marquez's masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude," but the novel is no less magical because it astutely demonstrates that love is the most natural of magics, able to compel men and women to do fantastic and desperate things.

Garcia Marquez tends not to be specific about naming his settings, but we can surmise that the novel takes place in a Colombian city on the Carribean coast over a span of at least sixty years that bridge the 19th and 20th centuries, a time when continual civil wars between Liberal and Conservative factions and cholera epidemics have been ravaging the country.

It is at the beginning of this epoch that Florentino Ariza, a timid, thin, poor young man with such a ravenous appetite for beauty that he eats flowers, falls in love with a beautiful girl named Fermina Daza while delivering a telegraph to her father. She reciprocates Florentino's interest through written correspondence conveyed by her nunnish aunt, but her father, thinking Florentino isn't good enough for her, takes her away on an extended vacation. When she returns and confronts Florentino, she realizes that her love for him has been extinguished.

Meanwhile, a handsome young doctor named Juvenal Urbino, having returned from studying medicine in Paris, becomes infatuated with Fermina. Her initial coldness eventually succumbs to his charm and manners, and they get married, spend a very long honeymoon in Europe, and for the next 51 years live a (mostly) happy life together as one of the city's wealthiest and most respected couples, with refined tastes in everything.

All this is naturally heartbreaking to Florentino, who resigns himself to bachelorhood and spending the next 51 years working his way up the ladder at his uncle's mercantile ship company and coveting Dr. Urbino's wife. He had been preserving his virginity for her, but after being raped by an unseen woman, he realizes that he can replace his love for Fermina with an "earthly passion" and proceeds to have liaisons with literally hundreds of women of all colors, shapes, sizes, and ages.

It seems inevitable that Florentino and Fermina will reunite after Dr. Urbino's death (a fatal accident while trying to catch his pet parrot), and I found satisfaction in the closure. As such, the novel feels like a fable or even an adult fairy tale, for that is Garcia Marquez's special trademark: the mature nonchalance with which he introduces elements from the humorously ironic to the darkly necromantic (consider the episodes of the black doll and the woman in white on the riverside). Love, marriage, and adultery are mundane things which in the hands of a lesser author become cliches, but achieve magical qualities in Garcia Marquez's unique world.

Rating:
Summary: The perfect summer love story
Review: I'll keep this review short and sweet, because really, this book speaks for itself. The rich imagery of Marquez brings you right into the tropical, flower scented world that this book is set in. The passion is just right for the summer, or when you feel as though you need to be reminded of it (for those of us who live in colder climates :) This is a truely amazing book that captured my heart.

Rating:
Summary: You will fall in love with this book for your entire life
Review: I'm a pushover for unrequited love, so my opinion may be a bit biased, but I no sooner finished Love in the Time of Cholera than it jumped, no, vaulted to the top of my list of the best books I have ever read.

A two-sentence synopsis might read, "As a young man, Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza and is rejected by her. After waiting 51 years for her husband to die, he renews their courtship," and of course this does the book no justice. Nor would a 25-page or even a 100-page summary suffice. Love in the Time of Cholera is one book that cannot possibly be digested without destroying some essential part.

And this is in the spirit of the book. Neither Florentino nor Fernanda can be wholly appreciated, wholly understood except in light of their whole life. Not only does each moment of present in their lives require knowledge of their past before it inspires sympathy, but it requires knowledge of who they will become in order to be presented in its fullest context.

To this end, Marquez presents the intertwined lives of the two characters not chronologically or even as a series of internally chronological segments, but in some conceptual order of his own making that attempts to present each character's entire experience at once, insofar as this is possible. So for example when a character makes a vow to himself, the next scene is a leap into the past to show what memory was going through his mind when he made the vow, why keeping it will be important to him. Then, the narration jumps ten years into the future beyond the vow to show the closest he ever comes to breaking it, to show exactly what circumstances would make him reconsider it and shatter his heart in deciding to keep it, and then, only then, can the story proceed from the point of the vow. Only then can you understand the significance of this vow in the character's life and have your own heart broken every time the vow comes into question. Throughout the book, Marquez constantly bounds through time to show, "What led to this?" and "What will this come to mean?" The presentation does not confuse, except when trying to figure out what age the characters might be in any given scene. It is, quite simply, the order events must be presented in to understand the characters' lives.

The presentation is so masterful, in fact, that you may feel the characters' emotions more strongly than you feel your own. You have only your memories to base your feelings on, but you are slowly acquiring their entire lives. You know not only where they have been, what hopes they had that are being fulfilled or dashed to the ground, but where this moment will take them. In the time of cholera, knowing the future does not spoil it -- it makes the present more real.

"More than real" is also a good description of the characters themselves. Florentino and Fernanda are no fairly-tale distillations of human beings, no archetypical personae with everything save this hopeless love or that haughty grandeur pared from them. They are, quite the opposite, so crammed full of human details and failings that it seems at times no human life could be that full of idiosyncracy. Every sentence displays another facet of personality. Florentino has difficulty as a businessman because he cannot keep his business letters free of love poetry. Fernanda smokes her cigarettes locked in the bathroom with the lit end in her mouth because she first had them as a guilty pleasure that no adult knew about. Florentino spends his time waiting out Fernanda's marriage in 622 "long-term liaisons" and countless one-night stands, and then tells her that for her sake, he has kept himself a virgin. You want to be like them not because their experience is at all pleasant, but because you slowly gain the suspicion that even as collections of words on paper, they are more alive than you.

Perhaps this is one of Cholera's messages. Florentino, whose life is based in a half-century of obsession with a woman who has rejected him, who witnesses his succession of abortive relationships, his mother's increasing senility, and the aging of himself and the one he loves, is nonetheless a happy man who wakes up each morning in the absolute confidence that when Fernanda becomes a widow, he will make her happy. Fernanda, who has resigned herself to whatever life brings her, even though it brings her a mostly good marriage, is slowly hollowed out by time until she requires Florentino's experiences and obsession to rejuvenate her. And in the end, it rejuevantes you as the reader, too -- it gives courage to love beyond reasonable hope and to live more than any human being can.

Rating:
Summary: I Am in Love
Review: You can't help but fall in love with the prose, with the characters, with the incredible story that pulls you in.

This is a story about a man, Florentino Ariza, who prefers to endure half a century of longing and loneliness than to betray his one true love. During the course of the story many times I said (aloud!): This is not love! This is an obsession! But in the end, I had to admit (with tears in my eyes at that) that Florentino Ariza owned the essence of love. He also convinced me that there is only one way to love anyone: with one's whole heart and one's whole life and with an unbending faith that love triumphs...eventually.
I gave lesser books five stars. I would have liked to give ten magnificent gold stars to my all-time favorite author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: 80th review! Hurrah!
Review: Garcia Marquez had a surefire masterpiece in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Since then, he spent about fifteen years writing, but no book really matched the smashing success of the aforementioned fine novel. Love in the Time of Cholera is on some level a self-conscious attempt to write another world-shattering novel; Marquez adopts the tone of a classic Spanish romantic and writes nothing less than an epic. For an epic is exactly what this is - a crackpot story of an unrequited love so noble, pure, and, well, epic, that it lasts a whole lifetime. And the thing is - it works. It works because Marquez is a master storyteller, and moreover, a man who knows and understands the complexities of life. This may be a story of unrequited love, but it's no forgettable fairy tale. As in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Marquez succeeds in writing a book in which it matters not a whit whether or not the events inside it actually did happen or could happen. The thing is, the way he writes it makes you believe that it could happen, and by virtue of that alone it becomes something that could happen.

It's not a perfect book. Marquez takes many of the unique stylistic elements and devices found in One Hundred Years of Solitude and reuses them, presenting them here in more conventional ways. This may sound like Love in the Time of Cholera is more accessible, but it actually isn't; I was not fully drawn into the book until the second half. When I _was_ finally drawn into it, though, I was _really_ drawn into it. Like Marquez's hero Florentino Ariza, I was very much playing for keeps. And I was amazed to find myself caring so much about his characters at that point that I literally could no longer stop reading. And given that, there really isn't much criticism I have about the book. Ideally, I'd give it four and a half stars, but since I don't have that option, I'm rounding it down to four. It is not the indispensable stunner that One Hundred Years of Solitude is, perhaps - if you have the goal of only reading one Marquez book in your whole life, it should still be that one - but it's a fine novel written by a master who has shown himself to still be at the top of his game.

Rating:
Summary: Who can paraphrase Marquez in a title?
Review: Marquez carries us along and into his dizzying world of brilliance and half-reality until we start to feel at home in this surreal place of his imagination, just as we have begun to accept the impossible characters not only as real, but also as people we actually know well and are comfortable with. And then, on page 326, a supporting actor who had been forgotten for one hundred pages reappears to engineer an illegal arms transaction with Joseph Conrad!

Even with an author for whom reality and fantasy are usually indistinguishable, such a thing is almost too much. I nearly had to stop reading, I was so astonished; and who knows? Such a thing might actually be historically accurate!

But such are the things that bring us back to Marquez, despite the numerous and often nearly-insurmountable difficulties; this, my second reading of Love In The Time Of Cholera and probably not my last because there is more to be discovered.

I sat through The English Patient twice because I thought there was a depth that I had missed the first time. There wasn't: the second time through it became disappointingly trite; not so with Senor Marquez ... you did miss it the first time, in fact, you missed most of it.

In case you did not know (I did not until I looked it up) there actually IS a Magdalena River that runs North, somehow avoiding being swept into the Amazon, and empties into the Caribbean Ocean. That much, at least, is factual and it wends much of its way in the modern country of Columbia. Perhaps it all seems so unfamiliar simply because we really are not familiar with this part of the world, and at the early part of the last century? Perhaps, but only partly; there is a great deal of the mundane human experience that is the same all over the world that I have visited and lived in, and Marquez breaks certain rules that simply are not broken in reality, however distant in time and space. And it is at least partly that breaking that makes him so appealing but also because he illuminates certain constancies that survive the maelstrom of events in his books in a way that speaks to my condition, if no one else's.

"... among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice. 'And when you do find one, observe with care,' he said to the intern: 'they almost always have crystals in their heart.'"

"... a clandestine life shared with a man who was never completely hers, but in which they often knew the sudden explosion of happiness, did not seem to her a condition to be despised. On the contrary, life had shown her that perhaps it was exemplary."

"Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore."

"... then the resolute steps in the courtyard and the man's voice: 'It is better to arrive in time than to be invited.'
She thought she would die of joy. Without time to think of it, she washed her hands as well as she could while she murmured: 'Thank you, God, thank you, how good you are.' ... But she dried her hands as best she could on her apron, arranged her appearance as best she could, called on all the haughtiness she had been born with to calm her maddened heart ... and [was] grateful to her fate for the immense relief of going home ..."

Marquez knows, of course, that she would return as soon as she was called. So grant him his prizes and read his books and don't ask why it ends as it does and don't ask what cholera has to do with anything.

Rating:
Summary: Like taking a leisurely tour through someone's mind
Review: As I read this book, the first thing that struck me was how beautifully Marquez transitioned from one idea to another. The book starts at the present time, where Fermina Daza's husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, has just died. Florentino Ariza has been in love with her for his entire life, so he confesses his love for her the moment he gets her alone on the day of her late husband's burial. From this scene, we cut back to their childhoods, where we see the origins of their love affair. We skip around in time to answer the question, ``What brought us to where we are?"

Marquez's point, it seems to me, is that one needs to know a whole life (I think Salman Rushdie wrote something like, ``To understand me, you must swallow a world") in order to understand any particular event within it. Lives are lived forwards but understood backwards - and in Marquez's world, they're understood sideways and upside-down. He shakes out the pockets of his characters to understand where they've come from.

The problem is that each character is living inside of his or her own little world. As ordinary people, we fundamentally can't get inside our acquaintances' worlds; as an author, Marquez can. So he ambles around through his characters' minds, poking and prodding to see what makes them tick. It's a beautiful technique, and Marquez handles the transitions between characters' minds with more finesse than I've ever seen out of an omnipotent narrator.

He also handles the transitions between time periods beautifully. As part of his story's structure, it's necessary for him at every juncture to step back and ask again, ``What brought us here?" So often he has to stop in the middle of a story and jump back a few years. Once he's done jumping back, he returns to the present. Once he's done with that story, he jumps ahead to where the previous juncture left him. And so forth. In the hands of a less capable author, this would seem jarring and irritating. In Marquez's hands, it's gripping: we can't wait to see how the present resolves itself.

Ultimately this is a very sad story, so a lot of the other reviewers' comments about the book's Latin heat don't fit well with me. In the end, the only reason we can understand all the people in this book is that Marquez can freely jump amongst them. As ordinary people, we don't have that luxury. What's more, we can *see* that the characters can't get inside each others' heads: Florentino Ariza keeps chasing his impossible dream even when we know that he's going about it all wrong. We're powerless to stop him. In the end, I find this book heartbreaking.

There are many good reasons to read this book. Among them: read it for the style, read it for the plot, or read it for what it tells you about the walls that exist between all humans. You won't be disappointed.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: Oh, my! What a beautiful love story! And told in such luxurious eloquence - truly dreamlike. If you haven't read Marquez before, go ahead and dive into this one. If you have read him before - I found this one very different (and superior) to One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Rating:
Summary: Indescribable
Review: After devouring but savoring One Hundred Years of Solitude, I needed to read another work by Marquez--frankly, I immediately pushed everything else to the side of my desk and began Love in the Time of Cholera. Marquez writes in a rare, rich style, one that moves the reader slowly, for each sentence is an individual piece of beauty. When you come across a book that makes you ultimately sad for completing it, you'll know Love in the Time of Cholera. The espescially descriptive diction is enticing enough to overwhelm you, to lead you to reread Love in the Time of Cholera immediately after its final, enchanting paragraph.

A description of Love in the Time of Cholera is an impossible task, so I hope you will read the first five, ten, or three-hundred pages to understand this aesthetic baptism.

The story is much like a fairy tale based around the decision of an elegantly beautiful woman to turn down a painfully romantic poet to marry a doctor. The married couple's inner life is surrounded by wealth in a luxurious mansion, the continuing beauty from trips to Paris, and the few quarrels that almost break their relationship. Their marriage lasts through the turn of the 20th century and its technological changes--until the husband's untimely death leaves behind a widow. Surviving the surrounding destruction and awaiting his love, the poet returns.