Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International) Reviews

• An Examination of Love

  
  By A17MQIVONTTRVP on 1999-08-13
  I think a lot of the online reviewers of this book don't realize that this book is not about the relationship of Fermina and Florentino. The book is about love in all of its forms, and the characters in the book exist as vehicles to examine the strangest and most powerful of all human emotions. Love in the Time of Cholera is about: unrequited love (Florentino for Fermina); marital love (Fermina and Juvenal); platonic love (Florentino and Leona); angry love (Florentino and the poet who makes him so furious); jealous love (the adulterous wife killed because of her affair with Florentino); young love (Florentino and Fermina in the beginning); dangerous love (the mental patient and Florentino); adulterous love (Juvenal and his affair, Florentino and many of his women); love from afar (Florentino and Fermina); elderly love (Florentino and Fermina, Fermina and Juvenal; the cyanide suicide); May-December love (Florentino and his ward); the relationship between sex, age, society, art, death and love (pretty much the whole book).

  I could go on, but you get the idea. Any attempt to read this book as the story of Florentino and Fermina misses the point. The book is still very enjoyable that way, but look beyond the surface and enjoy Marquez' ruminations on that thing called love that drives us all crazy.

  Incidentally, I think it's one of the best books ever written.
  
  

• Love as a strain of Cholera.

  
  By A3D9VXSUDX8J36 on 2007-10-05
  Considering Gabriel Garcia Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, this novel is an excellent selection for Oprah's Book Club. His second novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), a previous Oprah Book Club selection, has sold 36 million copies to date. Having read it several times over the past twenty years, it remains one of my all-time favorites. Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera) (1985) is another favorite. Set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it tells the poignant story of the power of unrequited love, and how lovesickness (much like cholera) can plague human existence. The novel involves a love triangle between Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza and Juvenal Urbino which endures for fifty years, revealed through a flashback from childhood to old age. As children, Fermina and Florentino experienced a brief romance leaving Florentino obsessed with Fermina and lovesick. In his unsuccessful attempts to alleviate his all-consuming longing for Fermina, Florentino not only engages in 622 affairs, but immerses himself in a life of poetry and literature. He identifies with romantic poets. Meanwhile, at the age of twenty-one, Fermina is forced by her father Lorenzo, a mule driver, to marry Juvenal Urbino, a doctor. Their arranged marriage endures. Fermina becomes a devoted wife, and critics have described her as a "freethinker." "She is the strong one," Márquez has said about Fermina Daza; "She is the novel." In contrast to Florentino, a romantic, Juvenal Urbino is a man of science, a doctor with a rational mind, committed to the eradication of cholera, and capable of providing Fermina with a sense of security. The novel opens with Juvenal's funeral, after which Florentino again declares his undying love for Fermina, which makes her furious. Until the novel returns to this scene and Florentino's renewed declaration of love for Fermina, one is left contemplating whether his love is a kind of nobility or a pathetic, Don Quixote-like foolishness. In the final pages of his novel, Márquez answers that question. As with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera reveals the extraordinary genius of Márquez. Highly recommended.
  
  G. Merritt
  
  

• A book for hopeless romantics

  
  By A36N33R9SU0I4H on 2000-09-05
  If you swoon at the thought of hopeless, tortured romances, then you must read this book! Florentino Ariza's long (half a century!), passionate, and tortured love for the haughty, oppressed Fermina Daza is the stuff of masochists. When the lady of his heart goes and marries another man, Florentino spends his life pining over her. Despite his finding solace in hundreds upon hundreds of sexual encounters, his heart remains true to her. Everything he does, he does with the hope of one day regaining her love. His rise as president of the local shipping company, his redecorating his childhood home, his devotion to the arts -- it's all for her. So strong is his love for her, that his tortured passion resembles the symptoms of the dreaded cholera, the disease that repeatedly ravaged this Caribbean town. And of course, there is also Fermina's husband, the illustrious Dr. Urbino. As the most respected, most innovative doctor in the region, he is beloved by all..... except his wife, who married him more out of convenience than anything else, after she realized that the poor Florentino could offer her very little. So will Florentino get his woman after waiting over 50 years for her? This sad, tragic, often humorous tale is, for me, Garcia Marquez's best novel... a must-read for both fans of the author and hopeless romantics alike.
  
  

• THE MANY ASPECTS OF LOVE

  
  By on 2000-06-09
  Love in the Time of Cholera takes place circa 1880-1930 in an unnamed Caribbean seaport city. The three main characters form a triangle of love, with the hypotneuse being the quintessential romantic, Florentino Ariza, a man whose life is dedicated to love in all its aspects.

  As a young apprentice telegrapher, Florentino Ariza falls hopelessly in love with the haughty teenager, Fermina Daza. Although the two barely meet, they manage to carry on a passionate affair via letters and telegrams, until one day, Fermina Daza, realizing that Florentino Ariza is more "shadow than substance," rejects him and marries the wealthy dandy, Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead.

  Florentino Ariza, who has sworn to love Fermina Daza forever, is, of course, stricken to the core, but Fermina's marriage is nothing he can't handle. As one century closes and another begins, Florentino Ariza rises through the ranks of the River Company of the Caribbean and sets off on a series of 622 erotic adventures, both "long term liaisons and countless fleeting adventures," all of which he chronicled and all the while nurturing a fervent belief that his ultimate destiny was with Fermina Daza.

  Fifty-one years, nine months and four days after Fermina's wedding, on Pentecost Sunday, fate intervenes and Fermina becomes a free woman once again when Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies attempting to retrieve his wayward parrot from a mango tree. Seeing his chance at last, Florentino Ariza visits Fermina Daza after the funeral and declares, "I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." Fermina's reaction is not quite what Florentino was hoping for. She orders him out of the house with the words, "And don't show your face again for the years of life that are left to you...I hope there are very few of them."

  Fermina Daza, however, hasn't quite gotten Florentino Ariza out of her system and the story ends, symbolically, with a river journey into eternity.

  It's hard to believe that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written a book that is better than One Hundred Years of Solitude, but with Love in the Time of Cholera, he has done just that. Not quite magical realism, it is still magic of the highest order and it is pure Garcia Marquez. An exquisite writer, Garcia Marquez tells his tales with passion, control and unblinking humor with just the right amount of the fabulous woven in.

  Unlike some of his slightly claustrophobic works, this novel has an almost epic quality and Garcia Marquez handles the shifts in time and character perfectly; from the opening lines you know you're in the hands of a master. The book is flawless: Not one word is out of place, not one sentence is awkward. Lesser authors might slip into the maudlin when writing an entire book on the many aspects of love, but Garcia Marquez never gives us less than crystalline insight into what it really means to live, to love and to live a life of love. The last chapter alone is a masterpiece no one who's loved, or loved and lost, will ever forget.

  As the book closes, we sail down the river with Garcia Marquez at the helm, safe in the knowledge that he is a navigator of the highest order, one who can pilot the river of love unerringly. He certainly does just that in this shining, sometimes funny and always uplifting book of flawless perfection.
  
  

• Love before the time of therapy

  
  By AJIM1RCXJBMMR on 2003-12-28
  The story line is ludicrous beyond words: a young man Florentino Ariza is rejected by a woman Fermina Daza that he supposedly loves, even though he never exchanged a single word with her. Not being a fool, she instead marries a prominent doctor Juvenal Urbino with whom she shares a long happy prosperous life. At the doctor's death, when everyone is now over 70 years old, the unflappable Florentino returns to conquer her at last, having obsessed over her day and night for 55 years.

  There is no doubt that Florentino is in urgent need of therapy, since he wastes his life in his delusional wait, jumping unscathed from one affair to the other. In that 55 year span, he has over 600 affairs. That would be about one a month, but the author refers to them as 'love' anyway... sorry but I have to laugh.

  Meanwhile our impetuous hero also mollests a child, seducing a 14-year old girl put in his charge by her parents. She ends up killing herself when he leaves her but nevermind, seems to say the author. Another one of Florentino's female conquests cannot be in love with him because she was a rape victim in her young age and she thinks she is in love with her rapist. I am not making this up.

  If this is Nobel prize material, I am a genius physicist.
  
  

• Rich, Savory Reading!
  By A3FPS27DXXR2UA on 2000-05-01
  For readers, this is a four-star entree meal. Garcia's prose is richly seasoned. His characterization is complete and immensely human. With his style of writing, he creates for the reader a prose that is complex, ornate, baroque, and deeply satisfying.

  The novel's scope ranges over the youth and old age of three characters, caught in unrequited love, surviving civil wars, deforestation of landscapes--both psychological and also natural--and outbreaks of cholera. Behind this hubris, Garcia details the fine distinctions of love and love lost.

  This novel, finally, gets better when you finish reading it; the sensual prose seeps into the reader's memory and makes for a haunting, echoing satisfaction. Yes, the ending is fulfilling. In fact, the last 50 pages of the book are simply incredible, but of course, the readers needs to read everything prior to this--as set-up--to get the reward of the finale.

  This is an incredibly satisfying novel.
  
  

• Obsession in a sultry climate
  By A2DSXA1E02C86D on 2002-01-05
  "Fermina, I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." Thus does Florentino Ariza lay bare his heart to Fermina Daza after - by the former's exact count - 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days of yearning.

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA tells of lifelong relationships and a lifelong obsession. Though the book doesn't indicate a time and locale for the storyline, it apparently takes place in a Colombian coastal town between, say, 1890 and 1950. During that period, Ariza's two opportunities to win the love of Fermina are separated by the latter's 50-year marriage to Dr. Juvenal Urbino.

  I must say up front that I think this novel will be better appreciated by female readers. However, I'm giving it 5 stars, not because my testosterone level is necessarily low, but because I myself enjoy stringing words together, and author Gabriel García Márquez is a master par excellence of that talent. I especially liked his technique of stating a relatively simple fact, and then telling in glorious detail how it got that way. For instance, within the first few pages he relates that Urbino's talking parrot escaped to the backyard mango tree, then dedicates 5 full pages of text to the background of the calamity. And, after Daza makes the statement that heads this review, the next 225 pages to the paths the three principal characters travel to arrive at that point. Throughout the narrative, Gabriel's prose is lush, flowery, and richly detailed, and credit must be given to the translator, Edith Grossman.

  The vast majority of the text is devoted to the Urbinal-Daza marriage, which, I suspect, follows the same evolutionary course as many others in real life, and a number of other, more transient or transitional love relationships. Regarding the bonds that tie a man and woman together, I venture that Márquez is a wise observer, as indicated by the following excerpts:

  "After their first encounters they had both lost awareness of their ages, and they treated each other with the familiarity of a husband and wife who had hidden so many things in this life that there was almost nothing left for them to say to each other."

  And an observation by Daza: "It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems ... and not really know if it was love or not."

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA is the splendid creation of one of the twentieth century's most gifted writers.
  
  

• Vivid writing, slow plot
  By A31WDOV3Q22ANV on 2003-07-18
  Several people recommended this book to me, saying it was like taking a holiday in the Caribbean. The writing does bring vivid imagry to my mind's eye and the characters are thoroughly developed, but to be honest, I have been trying to finish the book for months and the lack of plot is just dragging me down. I can only feel sympathetic for the whiney, romantic protagonest for so long with out losing interest.
  
  
• Is this really love?
  By A2CHGHSP85RCH8 on 2007-11-13
  I persisted through this difficult reading thinking that there must be something, somewhere that would evoke the feelings entailed in all the great reviews for this book. What a horrible disappointment. This book shows "love" in all its profane forms: seduction and molestation of a minor, adolescent and unrequited lust, fornication during a time of mourning, adultery, a rape that "enraptured" the victim, promiscuity without the reality of STDs and unplanned pregnancies, along with "love" resulting in suicide and homicide. I hope the movie is vastly different from the book.
  
  
• "Forever"
  By A3LWHTGUFOLH6C on 2001-11-29
  This is a book that simply cannot to be ignored. Lush, sensual and poetic in its prose, Marquez spins a vivid tale about a man's love for a woman that waits fifty years to come to fruition. Beneath the imagery and romance, however, lies Marquez's sharp observations on the nature of relationships, marriage and old age -- all told with Marquez's brand of humor, wisdom and unflinching veracity.
  The imagery pops alive in the mind's eye like no film can. In a tropical Caribbean setting, sometime between the close of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the environment becomes just as much a character as Florentino Ariza, and the dramatic story unfolds of his love for Fermina Daza. I'd love to recommend this for mature teens, but to truly savor it, you'll have to have lived a little. In the end, no matter what age, you will be the better for having read this masterpiece!
  
  
• Genius
  By ADBIGG5DAC660 on 2007-10-05
  I had the chance to read this novel in the original Spanish and then in English a couple years ago. The English translation was very well done, all the greatness of Garcia Márquez narrative is there. This is the kind of book (like 100 years of solitude) you can read over and over just to find new angles to the story. It is hard to go wrong with a Gabriel Márquez book. Great Literature.
  
  
• Not love, as I believe in it
  By A1EVDRGLVCYYVP on 2007-11-27
  As I began this book, I was recommending it to everyone. Marquez truly has a gift not only for beautiful description, but also for simplistic, powerful dialogue.
  
  Ostensibly, this is a story of unrequited love. As a young man, Florentino Ariza falls in love (at first sight) with Fermina Daza after he sees her reading outside her home one afternoon. He begins to, more or less, stalk her, though it's definitely an innocent teenage crush type of stalk, not the scary "I'm chasing you in a dark alley" type of stalk. Soon the two begin to exchange letters, leaving them in secret places so they won't be discovered. All goes as planned until Fermina is caught writing a letter in school, gets expelled and is taken away on a "forget your bad-boy boyfriend" trip by her father. When she returns many months later, she sees Florentino and decides her "love" was merely immature infatuation and rejects him completely, and shortly after marries the prestigious Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Florentino then spends the rest of his life waiting for Urbino to kick the bucket, so he can get his second chance at Fermina. He whiles away his time by having casual affairs with many many many women.
  
  I liked this book because it was well-written. The setting, a Caribbean island, is so vivid it feels like you're somewhere tropical while reading it; and as I said before, the dialogue is masterful--poetic even.
  
  I disliked this book for more concrete reasons. For one, it goes against my nature to throw away decades upon decades of your life simply biding your time for some person to have a change of heart. But, let it be said that I don't, fundamentally, believe that there is just one "true" love for any person, and I don't believe in love at first sight, so that definitely taints my views on Florentino's decisions.
  
  Second, one such `affair' that Florentino has, when he's in his seventies, is with a FOURTEEN year old. And not just any fourteen year old, but a girl he has been asked to act as the guardian over. The last time I checked, that was child molestation. And statutory rape. It's absolutely disgusting. I mean, I get that Marquez is trying to say that you can love at any age and that being old doesn't mean you're dead inside and useless, but seducing the child you're taking care of kind of leaps right over that point and lands firmly in a puddle of ick.
  
  Third, another woman Florentino is involved with explains that the reason she's never married is because she's been waiting to find the man that raped her one night when she was younger--so she can marry him. The rape, as it is described, involves the man grabbing her and forcing himself on her on a boat. She doesn't see his face, doesn't know him and he never speaks to her. So the only interaction she has with the man is that he grabs her on a boat and rapes her. The very idea that someone would create a character who enjoys being sexually violated by a complete stranger to the point where she "falls in love" with the man is infuriating. I mean, liking it a little rough or being attracted to an aggressive man is one thing--this is entirely another.
  
  Last, neither Florentino or Fermina is a very likeable character. Florentino is an unfaithful lecher who seems to have no remorse for the lives he ruins through his casual affairs (because, as the book explains, it's all about the love...of course it is), and Fermina is a rather dull, stuck-up and, dare I say it, bitchy woman. I really wanted something to like about the two of them, and I just didn't and I also didn't really find myself fighting for them to get together because the only thing ever keeping them apart was themselves. If you want to make yourself unhappy, be my guest. Just don't complain to me about it for 300 pages.
  
  
• Like taking a leisurely tour through someone's mind
  By A35PLM0LLD0XM9 on 2002-05-23
  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.
  
  

• A wonderful story
  By ADVLRJS633OTD on 2007-10-06
  The book is a bit repetitive in places but it is a delightful read. It spans two entire lifetimes. It takes place between the end of the 19th Century and ends in the beginning of the 20th Century. Like all Marquez novels, this one is well written and a joy to read.
  
  Marquez's use of fantasy realism is legendary and keeps the somewhat morose plot fun and moving. The main character stalks his lover in parks pretending to read on a bench as she passes by. His love becomes an obsession.
  
  Marquez shows that love and the sadness it can bring is not for youth alone. It celebrates the powerful hold that true love can have on a man his entire life. This is a book that a man would enjoy as much as a woman.
  
  Highly recommended.
  
  
  
  
• The Ageless Tale of Unrequited Love
  By A2QBSZYDSDTZX on 2007-10-05
  This story is tragically beautiful and Gabriel García Marquez is a master at creating flawless prose. After young love is broken apart by a well meaning father trying to protect his daughter's status, her starry-eyed suitor pines over her for half a century. Meanwhile, she marries, and he goes on to have numerous lovers in an attempt to fill the void she left but doesn't let any of them penetrate him emotionally. When her husband dies, he returns to declare his love for her.
  
  Throughout "Love in the Time of Cholera" I was reminded that a decision made by one person doesn't just affect that person, it rockets off in all directions and inflicts many. The story gives one hope that love is timeless--probably less so in real life. It's almost too much to believe that reuniting after 50 years makes up for all the pain and agony of missing your one true love. Gabriel García Marquez's literature is a pleasure to read and in the most perfect form. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" is another one of his that is a must read.
  
  
  
• More than a must read, I must re-read
  By A2FJAZT3YY2Y7X on 1998-10-24
  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.
  
  
• Made my skin crawl
  By A27UTNYLAW1OPZ on 2006-01-04
  I'm in a distinct minority here, but I was never so glad as when I finally finished this book. Fermina is uninteresting, and Florentino is a stalker, pervert, pedophile, and sexual deviant. Bleah. I needed a shower after this one.
  
  
• No love for psycho stalker/rapist!
  By A3IYW74G6VK2TJ on 2007-11-26
  I just finished reading this book, but only because of our book club; otherwise, I would have put it down long ago. This book is NOT about love! Florentino and Firmina don't love each other (until possibly the end when they finally start getting to know each other.) Florentino just sees her one day and develops an obsession which is NOT love. They exchange love letters, but don't really get to know each other. When she finally sees him face to face she realizes he's a weirdo, and calls it off. (Good for you, Fermina!) Florentino decides to "save himself" for her... by having a lifetime of affairs? Way to "save yourself", you psycho, commitment-phobe, stalker, predator, child-molester, rapist!!!! And don't tell me that "things were different then," that 14 year-olds were fair game: he knew he was molesting a child. He describes the baby games he used: "take off the sweater and put it on the teddy bear, put the shoes on the dolly, give papa a kiss on the tasty dicky-bird." This book makes me sick. I can't believe so many people buy into this. Not to mention it's poorly written! Maybe it loses something in translation from Spanish, but you can't start sentences with "So that..."
  Book club meets tomorrow, but the other women I've spoken with share my view. If you must read this book, borrow it. Don't waste your own money.
  
  
• One of his best
  By A22DUZU3XVA8HA on 2001-02-02
  True love exists. Set in the traditional and magical humid towns of Colombia, this tale of love develops for fifty years. There is almost no magical realism here, but magic of a higher sort: the magic of a true and desperate love. The novel is not tragic nor edulcorated: it is witty and funny. Florentino Ariza is a rather poor young man deeply in love with Fermina Daza, a well-to-do miss. She likes him, but decids to marry a prosperous physician, who is a good but rather dull man. Florentino never gets married, since he is always hoping that, somehow, Fermina will be one day by his side. In the long meantime, he has sex with hundreds of women, but never finds a love to replace Fermina in his heart. Parallel to the unfulfilled love affair, we are told the story of many times when cholera hits the town, with the drama of that disease compared to what Florentino feels for Fermina. The novel is long but you'll read quickly. It is one of the best stories of love there are, and Garcia Marquez is at his best here, along with "Chronicle of a death foretold" and "One hundred years of solitude".
  
  
• Sad and strange.
  By A3A4LTCLLOMWC9 on 2006-10-23
  I so do not understand all the rave reviews on this book. I read it recently for a book club selection, and let me tell you, If I didn't have to read it, I would have put it down after the first twenty pages, and never picked it up again. I found it to be dark, depraved, disgusting, and depressing! An examination of love in all it forms? Hardly! These characters were just plain goofy. I finally figured it out towards the end of the book, these characters were so miserable because they were lost spiritually. They were looking to other humans to provide them with true love, and that is just barking up the wrong tree. I am giving it one star only for the rich use of language.
  
  
• Pedophilia in the Time Of Cholera
  By A31QC9SKDIGWZT on 2006-06-30
  First, women do not find pedophilia romantic. If a young girl who was entrusted in the care of a 70 year old relative was made victim of his sexual appetite in real life, people would want to hang him, not contemplate the depth of his love. Supposedly, this book describes the varied types of love that exist. In my opinion, in the numerous relationships that the main character entered into there was no evidence of love. It all seemed like lust (in some cases it was like reading a trite sex scene from a pornagraphy magazine).
  Second, although the prose is well written, it can not make up for the fact that there is no plot line and the main character lacks depth. It is difficult to sympathize with a character who one finds loathsome. (I was able to sympathize more easily with Dr. Lecter from Silence of the Lambs.)
  
  
• Magic and Real
  By A3QI1MTHWYQPE4 on 2007-10-05
  Marquez is a master of magical realism who is able to deliver the most earthy observations next to scenes of almost ethereal beauty all with a mastery of language that has few modern equals. In this book, Florentino Ariza loses his love and waits 52 years until her husband dies to try to reclaim her again. To do so, he must convince Fermina Daza that love is a state of grace, not a means to an end but an end in itself.
  
  His commitment to love lives within him alongside a continuing search for his identity. When he meets Fermina, he becomes "another person, despite his firm decision and anguished efforts to continue to be the same man he had been before his mortal encounter with love." And while he waits to be with his love again, he has 622 relations with other women which, he believes, does not stop him from being a virgin.
  
  While he is the poet, he needs Fermina's grounding in reality. It is she who believes that the problem in public life is to overcome terror while the challenge of married life is to overcome boredom.
  
  The book is far more than the story or the endearing characters. At it's best, Marquez' language is transporting. Thomas Pynchon described it in a New York Times review in 1988: (Marquez) voice "has been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and, when called upon, take off and soar."
  
  Looking back over the book, I find passages and observations that have stuck in my head for almost 20 years although I long ago forgot where they originated. If you have not discovered Marquez, you will be adding a new source of richness to your life as you begin to read.
  
  
• You will fall in love with this book for your entire life
  By A1WIIKJ9PM9HYJ on 2002-07-20
  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.
  
  

• Blanket of Beauty
  By A14453U0KFWF31 on 2003-06-25
  I have read three books in my life which I acknowledge as life-altering. The first was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, which told me I wasn't an idiot for seeing some pretty stunning irony in government and the images my schooling had taught me to respect in America. I was never the same.

  Number two was Rescuing the Bible from the Fundamentalists. If you've ever been deeply troubled by the religious tradition handed down to you, yet unable to escape a spiritual dimension to your life, this is a book to read. I did, and never been the same.

  Last is Love in the Time of Cholera. I actually tried to start it three times, and couldn't get going. I didn't particularly like One Hundred Years of Solitude, and my hopes were waning. But, I gave it another go, and by the time I finished reading, I felt so utterly consumed by its beauty, that I couldn't sleep, my mind still abuzz.

  What captured me was the language and the images, and the feeling in my heart, which started small and grew steadily with each passing page to an all encompassing glow, of overwhelming wonderfulness. (I apologize for messy little phrase, but words fail) The last word of the book, when you read it, will set you free to fly. The beauty will wrap you up like a blanket amidst a cold, clever, too smart for its own good literary world. You will breath in it's lush jungle of humanity, and never quite leave it.

  This is a great book. Read it.
  
  

• Getting over Gobo: a guilt-ridden pan
  By A2DTOG3ET6YI4 on 2006-06-20
  Realizing that you don't like Love in the Time of Cholera is a bit like realizing that your beloved grandfather, who takes you to baseball games and makes you laugh at will, is an old bore with a lousy sense of humor. This doesn't mean that you love him any less - and it is virtually impossible not to love the tidal sweep of Garcia Marquez's sentences or the sunset splendor of his voice, which makes real life seem like a shadow of its Marquezian doppelganger - but you are forced to acknowledge that the novel is repetitious and self-indulgent, too often evoking the feeling of boredom by being boring. In contrast to the majesty of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the magical effect of this novel (and it does have a certain magic - the texture, if not the content, of a masterpiece) is simply a result of the passage of time, with Marquez leaving the main story on hold for 53 years and 250-odd pages to entertain us with sexual and scatological anecdotes, and the tale of Latin America's bout with the 20th century, a standoff between the apparently inexorable waves of modernization and the eternal truths of a coastal town: cholera, corruption, requited and unrequited love. As Florentino Aziza embalms himself in his pursuit of anachronistic love and Fermina Dava ossifies into a stately aristocratic housewife, Garcia Marquez increasingly loses sight of his characters and focus instead on showcasing his talents: it is like watching a master pianist, eyes closed, luxuriating in a particularly resonant chord and forgetting to carry on with the song. It may be beautiful but it is bad writing. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, the suicide whose character is carefully devloped over the first 50 pages, is entirely dropped. Time moves unsteadily backwards and forwards, and the characters can be inconsistent, sometimes within a single paragraph. The potentially critical relationship between Florentino and Juvenal is never explored, while Florentino's most compelling affair (with a girl 60 years younger than him) remains emotionally opaque.
  We want this to be a masterpiece and occasionally, especially in the tender descriptions of old age, it is close to perfect, but Marquez fails to deliver on its potential, selfishly keeping the novel to himself rather than surrendering it to its characters.
  
  
• Marquez is the Muse of Love
  By on 1997-09-27
  Where "100 Years of Solitude" is the greatest testament to family ever written, "Love in the Time of Cholera" is the greatest testament to love.

  I was lucky to have already experienced love before reading this book, because I don't know if I would have been able to comprehend this book without such an advantage.

  Read this book and you will forever be haunted by the smell of almonds. You will never forget the image of Fermina and Juvenal travelling in a hot air balloon as dead cows and human beings decorate the rivers below, their remains being eaten by vultures--Marquez' bird of choice.

  There are also two memorable scenes in this book for how painfully real they are. One, Marquez' description of Urbino's fall from a ladder, which leads to his death, is expertly detailed. Death is never a simple occurence in the world of Marquez', and Urbino's last breaths are decorated with thoughts of Fermina and the relief in having experienced love. Two: Fermina realizing, "moments" after her husband's death, that all her life, she has given her love to the wrong man.

  Never melodramatic because Marquez creates characters whose passions are all too human. There is such a thing as love in Marquez' world and nothing proves this more than Florentino Ariza writing his love for Fermina on rose petals.

  I hope that I will always have a love in my life as intense as the love Florentino has for Fermina, and if I ever have to wait as long as he did, I hope that my journey is as rewarding.

  Marquez teaches us that love comes in many forms and although we may expereince it differently, without it, we are incomplete. Ultimately, of course, his message is that with love we can easily conquer or "rise above" the most unbearable of human sorrows.

  Muchas gracias Senor Marquez! Eres un buen instructor!
  
  

• Sorry - Only one thing to say: Emperor's New Clothes!
  By A1VCPM2KFFL9TK on 2002-09-24
  Really - a rank of over 4 stars for this piece of rubbish? Why?
  
  I'm sorry - I'm going to offend some people - but this book is right up there with "Unbearable lightness of being" as totally overated.
  
  SPOLIERS ... sorry - but the book's not worth reading any way...
  
  The author writes at the beginning of the tale that the two main (married) characters have no major falling out throughout their long relationship. Then as the book progresses a major part of the story involves the wife being separated from her husband - she hides from him in her ancestral home.
  
  Sorry? What's the point in saying one thing then showing another?
  
  Then the famous unrequited love...
  
  This guy pines for the other man's wife for 50 years, wasting his life for a love that she does not return - not a sympathetic character at all.
  
  Meanwhile this loser has an affair with a 13 year old. She, as result of his sexual relationship with her, commits suicide! What is happening here? This is perversion.
  
  Then the husband dies, the guy with the 50-year-long infatuation pesters the widow with his unrequited love - on the day of the funeral!!! And then continues pestering her until she relents.
  
  This is totally sick stuff.
  
  No plot, not real point to it all, no real magic that makes this book more than a pile of hype.
  
  My goodness!
  
  It's a travesty of the art of novel writing.... spread the word near and far - this is a piece of rubbish... spurn it along with all the other psuedo literary pap that believers of the Emperor's new clothes see as worthy of acclaim.
  
  I wish there was a rating lower than 1!
  
  I seriously ask those who like such stuff: "What do you see in this sort of thing?" - I'm really interested, as well as worried for your state of mind!
  
  Edit: I've edited this twice over the past several years since I read the book - time heals all wounds - but wounded I was that I spent my precious time reading it. However I regret the language I used and so have moderated it - but I still think the book utter balderdash.
  
  
• It's Okay
  By AL5RHOTVO7J50 on 2007-10-08
  I read this in Spanish. It's just "okay." There's just something "odd" about this author (imo). I like his writing, but I've never gotten over the fact that he wrote "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" about an old man with a 14 year old girl.
  
  
• " The only regret I will have in dying . . .
  By A3LPMI7GGRU83E on 2004-06-28
  Is if it is not for love."

  This is the principal theme of Gabriel Garcia Marquez " Love in the Time of Cholera", his greatest novel. The second is waiting for the impossible to come true.

  Absolute devotion to an unrequited passion for 50 years? A frock coated inoffensive looking fellow who seduces over seven hundred women to ease his sorrow? Octagenarians acting like besotted adolescents?

  What on earth is going on here?

  Why, it's true love, of course, in all its indecency, selfishness, dissapointments, self-illusion and beauty.

  Sample passage:

  "Don't force me to shoot you ", he said.

  Florentino Ariza felt his intestines filling with cold froth. But his voice did not tremble because he felt himself illuminated by the Holy Spirit.

  "Shoot me," he said, with his hand on his chest. "There is no greater glory than to die for love."

  -----------------------------------------------------------------

  The novel opens up by introducing us to Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He's received an urgent call. Someone has committed suicide by cyanide.

  Here are the author's first words:

  " It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. "

  The dead man turns out to be his friend and chess partner.

  Marquez then proceeds to draws us into the world of Dr. Urbino, vividly and irresistibly. Clearly one feels that the sympathetic Juvenal Urbino is going to be an unforgettable character.

  And then we discover that Urbino is not the protagonist.

  Say what?
  
  Don't fight it, enjoy the language and take the last riverboat ride down the jungle.

  A work of genius and magic.
  
  

• An exquisite balance of humor and drama: best of the best
  By A1IANEBSMVGHS9 on 2001-08-07
  In a coastal Colombian city, between the XIX and the XX century, in a time when the cholera and the internal wars were making Colombia bleed in a way not too different from today's drugs wars and guerrilla, the literature Nobel-prize winner Garcia Marquez sets up a brilliant story.

  The simplistic person would deem the novel simply as a love story, and it is so. But also it is much more. Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza live through over fifty years of separation, during which the core of the story takes place. All the time, Florentino (a dramatic man who writes poems and is permantently dressed up in funeral-looking dark clothes with disregard for the heat of the Caribbean sun) remains faithful to the juvenile love for Fermina he feels within, while he lives a life full of the craziest and funniest love and flirting anecdotes.

  Fermina... well, that's part of the story, and I won't spoil it, but I can tell you that she gives Florentino the hardest of times during those fifty years, testing him, sometimes knowingly, sometimes without even suspecting it.

  At all times, with the coming and going of what I'd like to call 'secondary' characters, such as Dr. Juvenal Urbino, Uncle Leon XII, or Leona Cassiani, there is a big character that is always present, which is the environment surrounding Florentino and Fermina. There are countless and very enjoyable moments throughout the book, when the environment follows the lead of Florentino's mood, raining, for example, if he feels blue. The subtlety with which Garcia Marquez achieves this is nothing short of an act of genius. The novel as a whole is an incredibly enjoyable piece of literature, one of those which I'm convinced will stand the test of the ages to come. Not in vain is it considered one of the greatest books of the 20th century. And believe me: if you don't laugh very much while reading this book, you will have a very hard time finding ANYTHING to make you laugh.

  One final comment: if you're able to read in Spanish, grab the copy of the book in Spanish. You will enjoy it far more. If not, don't worry: you'll just regret that you don't know the language of Cervantes, so you can laugh harder while reading Garcia Marquez. :)
  
  

• The Pillars of the Earth (Deluxe Edition) (Oprah's Book Club)
• Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia
• One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.)
• Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
• Atonement