This was the second book of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I'm going to abbreviate that to GGM) that I've read and there was a similarity with the tedious passage of time and the tropical heat but this time without the magical realism flights of fantasy that I found hard to grasp in "A hundred years of solitude". Somehow I found the protagonist, Florentino Ariza, not an especially likeable character ...in fact in his casual seduction and abandonment of the teenage relative entrusted to his care, I found myself repulsed (I guess the Uggh factor in morality stepping in). ....."América Vicuña, in the grip of mortal depression because she had failed her final examinations, had drunk a flask of laudanum stolen from the school infirmary. Florentino Ariza knew in the depths of his soul that the story was incomplete. But no: América Vicuña had left no explanatory note that would have allowed anyone to be blamed for her decision." This was the teenage girl that Florentino had taken into his home and seduced and then abandoned. But GGM seems to make Ariz's dogged devotion over 60 years or so, a pillar of virtue. But I find it just weird that he didn't just move on as most people are won't to do.
But Ariza is not the only significant character. The object of his devotions Fermina Daza and Dr Urbino are equally strongly developed characters and there are innumerable minor players that I almost felt I got to know. And some wonderful vignettes such as that where Dr Urbino and Fermina have a "domestic"....just so well done and probably actually experienced! Viz: "Dr Urbino said to himself: I've been bathing for almost a week without any soap' Then, fully awake, she remembered, and tossed and turned in fury with the world because in fact she had forgotten to replace the soap in the bathroom..... The truth was that a week had not gone by, as he said to make her feel more guilty, but three unpardonable days, and her anger at being found out in a mistake maddened her. As always, she defended herself by attacking....."Well I've bathed every day,' she shouted, beside herself with rage, 'and there's always been soap.'............Although he knew her battle tactics by heart, this time he could not abide them. On some professional pretext or other he went to live in the interns' quarters at Misericordia Hospital, returning home only to change his clothes before making his evening house calls...... The incident, of course, gave them the opportunity to evoke many other trivial quarrels from many other dim and turbulent dawns. Resentments stirred up other resentments, opened old scars, turned them into fresh wounds".
Also interesting to get some insights into the carry-over of the various Viceroyalties that Spain established in Latin America ...a carry-over that I suspect contributed greatly to the inequalities that still exist today. A great little example here:
"But he did not want to contradict the Archbishop, although he would have liked to point out to him that guests were at that luncheon not because of what they thought but because of the merits of their lineage, which was something that had always stood over and above the hazards of politics and the horrors of war. From this point of view, in fact, not a single person was missing".
Some things piqued my curiosity: Do elderly people have their own specific odour? I've heard this before and must confess the there has been an odour of sorts in the various nursing homes I've visited at length via involvement with aging parents etc. But GGM makes quite a feast of it. For example: "With no scientific basis except his own experience, Dr Juvenal Urbino knew that most fatal diseases had their own specific odour, but that none was as specific as old age. He detected it in the cadavers slit open from head to toe on the dissecting table, he even recognized it in patients who hid their age with the greatest success, he smelled it in the perspiration on his own clothing and in the unguarded breathing of his sleeping wife". And again, much later in the book: "Florentino Ariza shuddered: as she herself had said, she had the sour smell of old age. Still, as he walked to his cabin, making his way through the labyrinth of sleeping hammocks, he consoled himself with the thought that he must give off the same odour, except his was four years older, and she must have detected it on him, with the same emotion. It was the smell of human fermentation, which he had perceived in his oldest lovers and they had detected in him."
GGM has a lovely writing style, generally captured beautifully by his translator. (In fact, I've heard that GGM was said to prefer his translator's version of his work in some cases to his own.......how curious).

But there are some lovely descriptive and insightful "nuggets" from which i've selected a few as follows:
"He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past".
"Everything seemed smaller to him [Urbino on returning from studying in Paris] than when he left, poorer and sadder, and there were so many hungry rats in the rubbish heaps of the streets that the carriage horses stumbled in fright. On the long trip from the port to his house, located in the heart of the District of the Viceroys, he found nothing that seemed worthy of his nostalgia.
"At last his father looked at him over his shoulder with a sad smile. If I died now, he said, you would hardly remember me when you are my age.'..He said it for no apparent reason, and the angel of death hovered for a moment in the cool shadows of the office and flew out again through the window, leaving a trail of feathers fluttering in his wake......[it still sends cold shudders down my spine].
I was curious about the title. Yes Cholera was certainly around....eg " No one doubted that the sanitary rigour of Dr Juvenal Urbino, more than the efficacy of his pronouncements, had made the miracle possible. From that time on, and well into this century, cholera was endemic not only in the city but along most of the Caribbean coast and the valley of the Magdalena, but it never again flared into an epidemic. The crisis meant that Dr Juvenal Urbino's warnings were heard with greater seriousness by public officials." But why was Cholera elevated to the level of being in the title? Maybe because it transcended political or dynastic boundaries. It wouldn't have the timeless quality if it was "Love in the time of the 30 year war" or similar.
And a lovely character description here: "Captain Rosendo de la Rosa was enthusiastic about his guest's enthusiasm, and he told him in detail the history of each object. As he spoke he sipped aguardiente without pause. He seemed to be made of reinforced concrete: he was enormous, with hair all over his body except on his head, a mustache like a housepainter's brush, a voice like a capstan, which would have been his alone, and an exquisite courtesy.
And the strange "affair" with eggplant: Fermina could not stand it until: "The harmony they had longed for reached its culmination when they least expected it, at a gala dinner at which a delicious food was served that Fermina Daza could not identify...... when she learned that she had just eaten, with unsuspected pleasure, two heaping plates of pureed eggplant. She accepted defeat with good grace, and from that time on, eggplant in all its forms was served at the villa in La Manga.....[so much of a transformation that] ...Dr Urbino would lighten the idle hours of his old age by insisting that he wanted to have another daughter so that he could give her the best-loved word in the house as a name: Eggplant Urbino". [We can see here the translator’s dilemma...this just doesn’t sound right in English; nor with the Spanish “berejena” .....but it works well with “Aubergine Urbino”. (Apparently a British word for the plant)..so I assume that this was probably the original wording.]
The strange truth revealed of how the most machismo of men had their come-uppence, viz: "A few years later, however, the husbands fell without warning down the precipice of a humiliating aging in body and soul, and then it was their wives who recovered and had to lead them by the arm as if they were blind men on charity, whispering in their ear, in order not to wound their masculine pride."
I must say that the descriptions of Florentino Ariza in the early part of the novel...his weakness, his ineptness, his sheer unsexiness dis not prepare me for the Florentino of the latter part of the book; the lover of endless hungry widows: "Still, they continued to be intermittent lovers for almost thirty years, thanks to their musketeers' motto: Unfaithful but not disloyal. She was also the only one for whom Florentino Ariza assumed any responsibility: when he heard that she had died and was going to a pauper's grave, he buried her at his own expense and was the only mourner at the funeral.".......and ...." Angeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner's cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion, and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs was a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival".

But a rather nice line as the teenage love affair is rekindles in old age: "It was the first time in half a century that they had been so close and had enough time to look at each other with some serenity, and they had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who had vanished and who could have been their grandchildren. She thought that he would at last be convinced of the unreality of his dream, and that this would redeem his insolence".

There are some sections of the book that I found madly disturbing (and i've commented on some above). But Florentino's up-river trip in his youth, when he was setting out on a bold new career, is developed so strongly and then just cut-short, abandoned, as though GGM got tired of it or had a change of mind. I almost found it like one of those childish stories that one wrote in primary school that were getting decidedly complex and hard to resolve and they finish in a flourish of "And I awoke and it was just a dream". Admittedly, he re-uses the images of the teenage trip up the river in the last part of the book...but then he seems to revert to the same "dream" trick.....with the riverboat plying the river forever with the old lovers. OK a few things annoyed me but overall I found it rather enchanting and captivating. Four stars from me. He justifies his reputation as a great novelist (and Nobel Prize winner). ( )

Is it love though?... What is love? I don’t really think this is love. This is a book about time not love. Time and its effect. The ‘love’ here is a vehicle to show us how time changes people.

I think it’s a sad book but a very realistic one: the impurities and imperfections of life and love - learning to make do, controlling people, being governed by fears and emotions, transient happiness, being shot, buffeted and ricocheting through life like a pinball until an errant parrot brings about one’s demise.

As my fifth (maybe sixth?) Marquez, I feel qualified to say his books can go one of two ways: brilliance or bore-fests. I have enjoyed such works as ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’ and ‘Voyage of the Shipwrecked Sailor’ but also hated ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ and now this. Partly I put it down to not being particularly romantic or liking fantasy but more so with this novel I just wanted to shake self-awareness into the characters. Granted, at the time the book was set, tradition and family pressures were rife, but I found it relatively infuriating that most of the characters spent their time pretending they were happy, oblivious they were unhappy or chasing idealistic ideas of happiness.

As a chronicle of time, I think it was really well done and brilliantly showed how time catches up with all of us (hence 2 stars not 1!) but ultimately not for me Gabriel, sorry, 2/5. ( )

Started out well, but as I read the book, I lost empathy for Florentino as he changed from a lovelorn dreamer to a stalker, predator, and pedophile. ( )

Evocative of time and place though a bit farfetched especially regarding unrequited love character. I can vividly emember many of the scenes and characters from the book. Too bad I didn't write a detailed review just when I had just finished it. ( )

Started out slow and authors style is hard to get used to at first. It’s not a quick read by any means. Paragraphs are long. But ultimately it turned out ok ( )