Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014)
Author of One Hundred Years of Solitude
About the Author
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia on March 6, 1927. After studying law and journalism at the National University of Colombia in Bogota, he became a journalist. In 1965, he left journalism, to devote himself to writing. His works included Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the show more Colonel, The Evil Hour, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth, Clandestine in Chile, and the memoir Living to Tell the Tale. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. He died on April 17, 2014 at the age of 87. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by Gabriel García Márquez
Collected Novellas (Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold) (1947) 747 copies, 2 reviews
One Hundred Years of Solitude | Love in the Time of Cholera | Chronicle of a Death Foretold (2019) 20 copies
Cien años de soledad y un homenaje: Discursos de Gabriel García Márquez y Carlos Fuentes (2007) — Author — 16 copies
Leaf Storm | The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor | No One Writes to the Colonel | In Evil Hour | One Hundred Years of Solitude (2014) 16 copies, 1 review
Big Mama’s Funeral | Innocent Erendira and Other Stories | Eyes of a Blue Dog | The Autumn of the Patriarch | Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1985) 6 copies, 1 review
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter | Dora, Doralina | One Hundred Years of Solitude | One Day of Life (1980) 6 copies
Cuatro aniversarios 5 copies
Leaf Storm | In Evil Hour 4 copies
La Soledad de América Latina: Brindis por la poesía (Colección Discursos Alpha Decay) (2008) 4 copies
One Hundred Years of Solitude | Love in the Time of Cholera | Chronicle of a Death Foretold | Collected Stories (2002) 4 copies
Eyes of a Blue Dog [short story] 3 copies
One Hundred Years of Solitude | Love in the Time of Cholera | One Day After Saturday (1999) 3 copies
The Saint [short story] 3 copies
One Hundred Years of Solitude | Love in the Time of Cholera | Of Love and Other Demons | Chronicle of a Death Foretold (2006) 3 copies
One Hundred Years of Solitude | No One Writes to the Colonel | The Autumn of the Patriarch (1989) 3 copies
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE 2 copies
De viaje por los países socialistas 2 copies
Crnica de una muerte anunciada 2 copies
Tramontana [short story] 2 copies
K rm z pazartesi : roman 2 copies
Gabriel Garcia Marquez/ De biografie 2 copies
Textos do Caribe - Volume 1 2 copies
Narrativa completa 2 copies
One of These Days [short story] 2 copies
Alle romans 2 copies
Me Alquilo Para Sonar: Capitulo 6 2 copies
La mala hora. Novela. (Donde los personajes protagonistas convierten a Macondo en un hervidero de rencor). (1982) 2 copies
غريق على أرض صلبة 2 copies
Montiel's Widow [short story] 2 copies
L' Automne Des Patriarches 2 copies
Un manual para ser niño 2 copies
قصص ضائعة 1 copy
The Sea of Lost Time 1 copy
A Farewell Letter 1 copy
In augustus zien we elkaar 1 copy
Caribe Mágico [short story] 1 copy
Glaza goluboi sobaki 1 copy
HUNDERT JAHRE EINSAMKEIT 1 copy
LOS FUNERALES DE MAMA GRANDE 1 copy
Vi ses i august 1 copy
Textos do Caribe (2 volumes) 1 copy
Cuba during the embargo 1 copy
UDHËTIM NË EUROPËN LINDORE 1 copy
JETO PËR TA TREGUAR 1 copy
Miłość w czasach zarazy 1 copy
Cent'anni di solitudine 1 copy
Cem anos de solidão 1 copy
Notizie di un sequestro 1 copy
One Hundred Years of Solitude | Strange Pilgrims | Love in the Time of Cholera | The Autumn of the Patriarch (2012) 1 copy
Cien anos de soledad 1 copy
Рассказ человека, оказавшегося за бортом корабля (Сто лет одиночества с книгами Маркеса) (Russian… 1 copy
เอเรนดีราผู้บริสุทธิ์ 1 copy
Outono do Patriarca, O 1 copy
Drumul spre Macondo 1 copy
La hojarasca 1 copy
Incredibila şi trista poveste a candidei Eréndira şi a bunicii sale fără suflet: [povestiri] (2002) 1 copy
Riba je crvena 1 copy
Сто років самотності 1 copy
Os Funerias da Mamãe GGrande 1 copy
Полковнику никто не пишет 1 copy
O amor nos tempos de cólera 1 copy
Innocent Eréndira 1 copy
De L' Amour Et Autres Démons 1 copy
Innocent Eréndira 1 copy
Sto roků samoty 1 copy
Chronicle of a Death Fortold 1 copy
Doce Cuentos Peregrinos T2 1 copy
L307 - Cem anos de Solidão 1 copy
O AMOR NOS TEMPOS DO CÓLERA 1 copy
VJESHTA E PATRIARKUT 1 copy
SHIHEMI NË GUSHT 1 copy
Ben,m Hüzünlü Orospularım 1 copy
CEM ANOS DE SOLIDÃO 1 copy
La Littérature Chinoise 1 copy
NJQIND VJET VETMI 1 copy
Tuyển Tập Truyện Ngắn 1 copy
Generalul in labirintul sau 1 copy
Un veac de singuratate 1 copy
Comunicario 1 copy
61/75 ALTERNATIVA. ATREVERSE A PENSAR ES EMPEZAR A LUCHAR. EL F-2 DAS B-2 E-2 ¿QUIÉN LOS CONTROLA? 1 copy
A professora e o nobel 1 copy
Sad Saal Tanhai 1 copy
VIVA SANDINO 1 copy
92/76 ALTERNATIVA. ATREVERSE A PENSAR ES EMPEZAR A LUCHAR. PECULADO EN EL DAS ¿GENERAL A LA CÁRCEL? 1 copy
Operación carlota 1 copy
2002 1 copy
L’amour en temps de choléra 1 copy
Obras Completas 31 Tomos 1 copy
CONTEMPORÁNEA 1 copy
Caldas 1 copy
ذاكرة غانياتي الحزينات Thakirat Ghaniati al Hazinat / Memories of My Melancholy Whores 1 copy, 1 review
Opere 1 copy
Saga af sæháki 1 copy
Images ofCuba 1 copy
Gabo en Alfaguara 1 copy
[unidentified works] 1 copy
Libros cubanos de Gabo 1 copy
Associated Works
The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (1976) — Contributor — 1,215 copies, 3 reviews
Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (1995) — Contributor, some editions — 1,015 copies, 7 reviews
The World of the Short Story: A 20th Century Collection (1986) — Contributor — 512 copies, 4 reviews
The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories (1986) — Contributor — 381 copies, 3 reviews
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Tenth Annual Collection (1997) — Contributor — 301 copies, 5 reviews
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (1994) — Contributor — 282 copies, 3 reviews
Other Voices, Other Vistas: Short Stories from Africa, China, India, Japan, and Latin America (1992) — Contributor — 212 copies, 2 reviews
The Graphic Canon, Vol. 3: From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest (2013) — Contributor — 162 copies, 1 review
A Hammock Beneath the Mangoes: Stories from Latin America (1991) — Contributor — 162 copies, 3 reviews
The Circle of Life: Rituals from the Human Family Album (1991) — Introduction, some editions — 148 copies, 2 reviews
An American Album: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Harper's Magazine (2000) — Contributor — 145 copies, 1 review
Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (2010) — Contributor — 76 copies, 15 reviews
Masterworks of Latin American Short Fiction: Eight Novellas (1996) — Contributor — 57 copies, 1 review
Introducción a la literatura hispanoamericana : de la conquista al siglo XX (1997) — Contributor — 23 copies
Fidel Castro Speeches: Cuba's Internationalist Foreign Policy, Speeches, vol. 1, 1975–80 (1981) — Contributor — 20 copies
Het continent van de eenzaamheid reportages en beschouwingen over Latijns-Amerika (1992) — Contributor — 6 copies
Confesiones de escritores, escritores latinoamericanos : los reportajes de The Paris Review (1996) — Contributor — 5 copies
Maestros de la Literatura Universal: Latinoamerica — Contributor — 3 copies
Hoog zomerboek : dertien romans, novellen en lange verhalen van Gabriel García Márquez, Roald Dahl, Herman Koch, David (1994) — Contributor — 3 copies
Tales of the Magicians: Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Jorge Luis Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa, Miguel Otero Silva and… (2002) — Contributor — 3 copies
La Otredad: Antología de cuentos latinoamericanos del siglo XX (2015) — Contributor — 3 copies, 1 review
Meesters der vertelkunst : zevenendertig verhalen uit de moderne wereldliteratuur (1975) — Contributor — 2 copies
I'm the One You're Looking For [1988 film] — Author — 2 copies
The Summer of Miss Forbes [TV episode] — Author — 1 copy
Oitenta, Vol. 6 — Contributor — 1 copy
The Review of Conttemporary Fiction: Number VIII, #2 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- García Márquez, Gabriel
- Legal name
- García Márquez, Gabriel José de la Concordia
- Other names
- Márquez, Gabriel García
- Birthdate
- 1927-03-06
- Date of death
- 2014-04-17
- Gender
- male
- Education
- boarding school (Barranquilla ∙ Colombia)
Liceo Nacional (Zipaquirá)
National University of Colombia (Law ∙ Journalism)
Universidad de Cartegena - Occupations
- journalist
reporter
novelist - Organizations
- El Heraldo newspaper (reporter, editor)
El Universal newspaper (reporter, editor)
Barranquilla Group (member)
American Academy of Arts and Letters (Foreign Honorary, Literature, 1974)
Fundacion para un Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), President - Awards and honors
- scholarship (Liceo Nacional)
Neustadt International Prize for Literature (1972)
Nobel Prize (Literature ∙ 1982)
Man Booker International Prize Finalist (2005) - Relationships
- García, Rodrigo (son)
Vargas Llosa, Mario (student) - Cause of death
- pneumonia
- Nationality
- Colombia
- Birthplace
- Aracataca, Magdalena, Colombia
- Places of residence
- Bogotá, Colombia
Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico - Place of death
- Mexico City, Distrito Federal, Mexico
- Burial location
- cremated
- Map Location
- Colombia
Members
Discussions
26Shorts2026: ShortsRead --- Anisha's 2026 log in 26 Short Stories for 2026 (June 17)
OT: Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s last unfinished work being published in Folio Society Devotees (March 2024)
THE DEEP ONES: "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" by Gabriel García Márquez in The Weird Tradition (February 2024)
Gabriel García Márquez dies, aged 87 in South American Fiction-Argentine Writers (June 2014)
GROUP READ --- "Love in the time of the cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in The 12 in 12 Category Challenge (June 2012)
1001 Group Read: 100 Years of Solitude in 1001 Books to read before you die (July 2011)
Group Read: 100 Years of Solitude in Club Read 2011 (July 2011)
GROUP READ: Love In The Time Of Cholera in 1001 Books to read before you die (June 2011)
Reviews
A late novella by the Colombian Nobelist, playing around with ideas about old age, love and loneliness whilst doing his best to shock his readers and stir up a bit of controversy.
The narrator, a veteran journalist who has been running away from love all his life, decides to treat himself on his ninetieth birthday to a night of pleasure with an underage prostitute. It doesn’t quite work out like that — the girl has been sedated to calm her nerves and he finds her fast asleep and show more doesn’t have the heart to wake her, so they do nothing more than sleep in the same bed — but there is something about the experience that makes him want to repeat it, and he soon becomes obsessed with the girl and convinces himself that it is love, even though they have never both been awake at the same time during any of their encounters and he knows almost nothing about her, least of all her name. So we know it’s all nonsense and delusion, that he is being tricked just as much as the girl is being exploited, but GGM writes it in such a captivating way that we can’t help being drawn in to sympathise (at least a little bit) with the would-be child sex abuser. Disturbing. show less
The narrator, a veteran journalist who has been running away from love all his life, decides to treat himself on his ninetieth birthday to a night of pleasure with an underage prostitute. It doesn’t quite work out like that — the girl has been sedated to calm her nerves and he finds her fast asleep and show more doesn’t have the heart to wake her, so they do nothing more than sleep in the same bed — but there is something about the experience that makes him want to repeat it, and he soon becomes obsessed with the girl and convinces himself that it is love, even though they have never both been awake at the same time during any of their encounters and he knows almost nothing about her, least of all her name. So we know it’s all nonsense and delusion, that he is being tricked just as much as the girl is being exploited, but GGM writes it in such a captivating way that we can’t help being drawn in to sympathise (at least a little bit) with the would-be child sex abuser. Disturbing. show less
"… could not bear the pestilential stink of its glories, the arrogance of its bulwarks…" (pg. 346)
I knew a guy once – I am reluctant to call him a 'man' – who proved himself one of the most contemptible people I've ever met. Venal, cowardly and physically repellent, he would often act like everyone's best friend and stroll around with a loud voice and a huge grin, providing you no opening to challenge him on his behaviour. He would brag about fucking women and then kicking them out show more of bed, and about his great ambition to 'try' different races. The natural conclusion to make, you would think, would be that this was crude, baseless braggadocio. However, events soon transpired which proved it was not only true but undersold. It turned out he liked to get wasted on drink and drugs and use it as an excuse to smack women around, the younger the better. When it finally seemed like he would face some consequences, he developed a penchant for crocodile tears and facile squirming, bemoaning his 'addictions' and claiming he only needed to find the right woman to love him. I regret to report that it worked – not only did his latest female punching-bag (all of 18 years old, and of the race that he'd expressed a particular keenness on 'trying') fall for the line that she was the right woman, but the vast majority of the people around him also began to feel sorry for him and his 'trials'. He emerged from the whole scenario not only intact but raised up, and pretty soon he was back to the loud voice and the huge grin, with the drugs he'd ostentatiously thrown away quietly returned to pride of place. The fists too, presumably. It was a lesson in dissembling and self-pity that I hope never to forget.
I mention this unpleasant story only because I did not expect to find a similar lesson when picking up Gabriel García Márquez's lauded novel Love in the Time of Cholera, which was his first after winning the Nobel Prize. Márquez was a writer I respected, even if I struggled to develop a real love for his writing when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I found some worth in those books, and had heard that Cholera was a good book for those who did not like Solitude (and vice versa). Instead it proved to be one of the very, very few books I wanted to throw at the wall, an uncritical and self-pitying indulgence of the same behaviours I mentioned above, all argued shamelessly in the name of la pasión. I could only finish it because of my firm rule to finish every book I start.
The book starts off with the melodramatic simping of the young Florentino Ariza, mooning monomaniacally over Fermina Daza, who herself responds with haughty self-regard. I hope those two characters sound appealing, because if you want to finish Love in the Time of Cholera you will have to follow them through the next 50+ years of their lives as they behave like spoilt children, having everything given to them but with so little self-awareness that Fermina, after a long and prosperous life with another man (a rich doctor husband), a mansion and social prestige and maids to wait on her hand and foot, can sigh and say with a straight face that her life had had "more difficulties than pleasures" (pg. 329). The two end up living happily ever after, and I shall come onto Florentino Ariza presently, but the vanity is not confined to just them (as it might be if Márquez was competently framing them in a literary juxtaposition). Fermina's husband Juvenal, at one point, commends his own "heroic resolve" for overcoming the "private catastrophe" of being unable to continue a fetishized affair with a black woman (pg. 248). "Just think what it mean for poor black woman like me to have such a famous man notice her," she had told him just a few pages earlier (pg. 243).
Before turning to Florentino Ariza, it is worth mentioning that the litany of appalling and narcissistic behaviour chronicled throughout Love in the Time of Cholera is told in a sympathetic, indulgent monologue that is almost entirely plotless. The prose, which can at first be charitably described as 'ornate', quickly becomes overbearing as we lose faith in the fetid characters. I was crying out for some dialogue, of which there is little in the book and even less that is good. The bulk of the prose is tedious melodrama, with women being described as the "lionlady of my soul" (pg. 187) and men weeping by moonlight and describing the opportunity to talk to the woman they are infatuated with as "the greatest moment of my life" (pg. 61). When the afore-mentioned rich doctor husband with the beautiful wife can't go to his 'poor black woman', "the world became a hell for him" (pg. 245). The conceit is palpable on every page.
This brings us, finally, to Florentino Ariza. "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse," he cries on page 270, and unfortunately it has the same smell too. His love for Fermina, which is meant to drive the novel, is baseless, and he then spends the bulk of the novel wallowing in self-pity and notching up 'conquests'. Women see him on public transport and follow him home because they are desperate to sleep with him (pg. 183), but if you think that pathetic fantasy is the nadir, you haven't seen anything yet. An egocentric empty vessel, Ariza sounds like those grubby, clichéd guys out there who talk about how much they love their wife but simply need other women too. "Deprived of one, he wanted to be with them all at the same time," even those from his past who now "slept in the cemeteries" (pg. 269); a callous, narcissistic remark even before you remember that one of his affairs ends with the woman's throat being slit by her husband, after Ariza's casual disregard for keeping it quiet (pg. 217). Again, this is not the nadir – a word that soon ceases to have any meaning when assessing this particular book.
An anecdote is told of a "very young" black girl being violently raped by a stranger who leaps out at her on a jetty. She "wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms" and puts the word out in town that she wants to find this "big, strong fellow" again in the hope of re-experiencing his "way of making love" (pg. 258). Ariza is not this man, but he seems to take the story to heart, for later on he casually rapes a maid and marries her off to some patsy when she gets pregnant (pg. 316). He must be very virile, Márquez's romantic champion, for he later sees it as a point of honour, when he grooms a 14-year-old schoolgirl, that "she was the only one with whom he took drastic precautions against accidental pregnancy" (pp272-3). If you think Hollywood films are all the same nowadays, start reading novels; there's enough out there to turn your shit black.
If I can use the word one last time, this might very well be the nadir in a book that was already plummeting because of its rape indulgence and racial fetishization. The attention Márquez gives to América Vicuña, a secondary-school student still wearing her uniform and needing Ariza to tie the laces on her school shoes (pg. 275), is irredeemably repulsive. Ariza loves her "diaper smell" (pg. 335) – he's 70 years old at this point – and though she "was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees… he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year" (pg. 272). She, of course, loves him unconditionally and likes nothing more than to plant "a little kiss on her papa's precious dicky-bird" (pg. 295). She also, of course, ends up killing herself (pg. 336); one more for Ariza's cemeteries.
At this point, if you've endured 300+ pages of the novel, you might start to appreciate that there's something more going on in Márquez's writing; that perhaps our dangerous, self-indulgent, life-wrecking protagonists are not meant to be viewed uncritically. I usually cotton on to this sort of stuff quite easily, and I count Lolita and The Merchant of Venice among my favourite books, both of which use such a mischievous, dexterous indulgence of depravity to great satirical effect (I've written reviews of both on this website). If this is the case in Cholera, well, Márquez is not fit to kiss Nabokov's precious dicky-bird. Even if Márquez is on record as encouraging such an interpretation, he's also on record as saying the Ariza and Fermina relationship is based on his own loving parents, the only difference being that his parents got married. There's scarce little in the prose itself to encourage such an ironical interpretation, and if the author has to explain the piece, it's a sign that the piece hasn't prompted us to it on its own – in the way art should. In contrast to Lolita, where Humbert's verbose first-person viewpoint emphasises his contemptibility, and The Merchant of Venice, where the farcical trial of Shylock is deconstructed by the nature of the play itself, Cholera's purported irony and subversion of love might well be nothing more than a vain hope on the reader's part. I remember thinking it cruelly ironic that the Nazis commissioned performances of The Merchant of Venice, as though it supported their views when it did anything but; I see a possible analogue in the fact that the people who praise Love in the Time of Cholera seem to praise its romance above all. It is entirely in keeping with our societal substitution of love with self-esteem. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Oprah called it "one of the greatest love stories".) If there is irony, I can't enjoy it, because Márquez as author hasn't done enough to facilitate it.
In the end, I could read Love in the Time of Cholera only with great and justified hostility. There's enough vanity and malicious behaviour indulged in the real world, as I outlined in my opening story, and though I don't want art to shy away from bad things, it's one thing to address them and another to indulge them. Life's too short to listen to such tedious wank. There's enough pseudo-philosophical justification of misandry, misogyny and "getting yours" at others' expense, without bringing that indoors and giving it a prize. There's something to engage with in the book, the equation of 'love' with choleric disease, but the entire book is so dense and smitten with its deplorable characters that even committed readers will lose the desire to extract literary worth from the swamp of indulgence, melodrama and self-congratulatory rape. Forget Márquez's bastardization of love; I found myself rooting for the cholera. show less
I knew a guy once – I am reluctant to call him a 'man' – who proved himself one of the most contemptible people I've ever met. Venal, cowardly and physically repellent, he would often act like everyone's best friend and stroll around with a loud voice and a huge grin, providing you no opening to challenge him on his behaviour. He would brag about fucking women and then kicking them out show more of bed, and about his great ambition to 'try' different races. The natural conclusion to make, you would think, would be that this was crude, baseless braggadocio. However, events soon transpired which proved it was not only true but undersold. It turned out he liked to get wasted on drink and drugs and use it as an excuse to smack women around, the younger the better. When it finally seemed like he would face some consequences, he developed a penchant for crocodile tears and facile squirming, bemoaning his 'addictions' and claiming he only needed to find the right woman to love him. I regret to report that it worked – not only did his latest female punching-bag (all of 18 years old, and of the race that he'd expressed a particular keenness on 'trying') fall for the line that she was the right woman, but the vast majority of the people around him also began to feel sorry for him and his 'trials'. He emerged from the whole scenario not only intact but raised up, and pretty soon he was back to the loud voice and the huge grin, with the drugs he'd ostentatiously thrown away quietly returned to pride of place. The fists too, presumably. It was a lesson in dissembling and self-pity that I hope never to forget.
I mention this unpleasant story only because I did not expect to find a similar lesson when picking up Gabriel García Márquez's lauded novel Love in the Time of Cholera, which was his first after winning the Nobel Prize. Márquez was a writer I respected, even if I struggled to develop a real love for his writing when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude and Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I found some worth in those books, and had heard that Cholera was a good book for those who did not like Solitude (and vice versa). Instead it proved to be one of the very, very few books I wanted to throw at the wall, an uncritical and self-pitying indulgence of the same behaviours I mentioned above, all argued shamelessly in the name of la pasión. I could only finish it because of my firm rule to finish every book I start.
The book starts off with the melodramatic simping of the young Florentino Ariza, mooning monomaniacally over Fermina Daza, who herself responds with haughty self-regard. I hope those two characters sound appealing, because if you want to finish Love in the Time of Cholera you will have to follow them through the next 50+ years of their lives as they behave like spoilt children, having everything given to them but with so little self-awareness that Fermina, after a long and prosperous life with another man (a rich doctor husband), a mansion and social prestige and maids to wait on her hand and foot, can sigh and say with a straight face that her life had had "more difficulties than pleasures" (pg. 329). The two end up living happily ever after, and I shall come onto Florentino Ariza presently, but the vanity is not confined to just them (as it might be if Márquez was competently framing them in a literary juxtaposition). Fermina's husband Juvenal, at one point, commends his own "heroic resolve" for overcoming the "private catastrophe" of being unable to continue a fetishized affair with a black woman (pg. 248). "Just think what it mean for poor black woman like me to have such a famous man notice her," she had told him just a few pages earlier (pg. 243).
Before turning to Florentino Ariza, it is worth mentioning that the litany of appalling and narcissistic behaviour chronicled throughout Love in the Time of Cholera is told in a sympathetic, indulgent monologue that is almost entirely plotless. The prose, which can at first be charitably described as 'ornate', quickly becomes overbearing as we lose faith in the fetid characters. I was crying out for some dialogue, of which there is little in the book and even less that is good. The bulk of the prose is tedious melodrama, with women being described as the "lionlady of my soul" (pg. 187) and men weeping by moonlight and describing the opportunity to talk to the woman they are infatuated with as "the greatest moment of my life" (pg. 61). When the afore-mentioned rich doctor husband with the beautiful wife can't go to his 'poor black woman', "the world became a hell for him" (pg. 245). The conceit is palpable on every page.
This brings us, finally, to Florentino Ariza. "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse," he cries on page 270, and unfortunately it has the same smell too. His love for Fermina, which is meant to drive the novel, is baseless, and he then spends the bulk of the novel wallowing in self-pity and notching up 'conquests'. Women see him on public transport and follow him home because they are desperate to sleep with him (pg. 183), but if you think that pathetic fantasy is the nadir, you haven't seen anything yet. An egocentric empty vessel, Ariza sounds like those grubby, clichéd guys out there who talk about how much they love their wife but simply need other women too. "Deprived of one, he wanted to be with them all at the same time," even those from his past who now "slept in the cemeteries" (pg. 269); a callous, narcissistic remark even before you remember that one of his affairs ends with the woman's throat being slit by her husband, after Ariza's casual disregard for keeping it quiet (pg. 217). Again, this is not the nadir – a word that soon ceases to have any meaning when assessing this particular book.
An anecdote is told of a "very young" black girl being violently raped by a stranger who leaps out at her on a jetty. She "wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms" and puts the word out in town that she wants to find this "big, strong fellow" again in the hope of re-experiencing his "way of making love" (pg. 258). Ariza is not this man, but he seems to take the story to heart, for later on he casually rapes a maid and marries her off to some patsy when she gets pregnant (pg. 316). He must be very virile, Márquez's romantic champion, for he later sees it as a point of honour, when he grooms a 14-year-old schoolgirl, that "she was the only one with whom he took drastic precautions against accidental pregnancy" (pp272-3). If you think Hollywood films are all the same nowadays, start reading novels; there's enough out there to turn your shit black.
If I can use the word one last time, this might very well be the nadir in a book that was already plummeting because of its rape indulgence and racial fetishization. The attention Márquez gives to América Vicuña, a secondary-school student still wearing her uniform and needing Ariza to tie the laces on her school shoes (pg. 275), is irredeemably repulsive. Ariza loves her "diaper smell" (pg. 335) – he's 70 years old at this point – and though she "was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees… he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year" (pg. 272). She, of course, loves him unconditionally and likes nothing more than to plant "a little kiss on her papa's precious dicky-bird" (pg. 295). She also, of course, ends up killing herself (pg. 336); one more for Ariza's cemeteries.
At this point, if you've endured 300+ pages of the novel, you might start to appreciate that there's something more going on in Márquez's writing; that perhaps our dangerous, self-indulgent, life-wrecking protagonists are not meant to be viewed uncritically. I usually cotton on to this sort of stuff quite easily, and I count Lolita and The Merchant of Venice among my favourite books, both of which use such a mischievous, dexterous indulgence of depravity to great satirical effect (I've written reviews of both on this website). If this is the case in Cholera, well, Márquez is not fit to kiss Nabokov's precious dicky-bird. Even if Márquez is on record as encouraging such an interpretation, he's also on record as saying the Ariza and Fermina relationship is based on his own loving parents, the only difference being that his parents got married. There's scarce little in the prose itself to encourage such an ironical interpretation, and if the author has to explain the piece, it's a sign that the piece hasn't prompted us to it on its own – in the way art should. In contrast to Lolita, where Humbert's verbose first-person viewpoint emphasises his contemptibility, and The Merchant of Venice, where the farcical trial of Shylock is deconstructed by the nature of the play itself, Cholera's purported irony and subversion of love might well be nothing more than a vain hope on the reader's part. I remember thinking it cruelly ironic that the Nazis commissioned performances of The Merchant of Venice, as though it supported their views when it did anything but; I see a possible analogue in the fact that the people who praise Love in the Time of Cholera seem to praise its romance above all. It is entirely in keeping with our societal substitution of love with self-esteem. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Oprah called it "one of the greatest love stories".) If there is irony, I can't enjoy it, because Márquez as author hasn't done enough to facilitate it.
In the end, I could read Love in the Time of Cholera only with great and justified hostility. There's enough vanity and malicious behaviour indulged in the real world, as I outlined in my opening story, and though I don't want art to shy away from bad things, it's one thing to address them and another to indulge them. Life's too short to listen to such tedious wank. There's enough pseudo-philosophical justification of misandry, misogyny and "getting yours" at others' expense, without bringing that indoors and giving it a prize. There's something to engage with in the book, the equation of 'love' with choleric disease, but the entire book is so dense and smitten with its deplorable characters that even committed readers will lose the desire to extract literary worth from the swamp of indulgence, melodrama and self-congratulatory rape. Forget Márquez's bastardization of love; I found myself rooting for the cholera. show less
It took me just about a day of "shelter in place" reading to enjoy this short, charming novel. It had been a while since I read any Marquez and was happy to return to his world, if only for the day. The story takes place in coastal city of an unnamed South American country during colonial days. The beautiful, young Sierva Maria, the only daughter of a dissolute nobleman, is bitten by a rabid dog on her 12th birthday. Are the subsequent manifestations of her wild, unruly spirit manifestations show more of the disease or of demonic possession? Marquez skillfully weaves themes of the passions of love, the ills and absurdities of a repressive culture, especially when it comes to powerless young women, and the inevitable dissolution of a bankrupt colonial system ruled from a distance of thousands of miles into 147 pages of floating, lyrical fable. show less
This is a book. Going in, I knew that it was a modern classic of South American literature and both Worthy and Important, after all, I've had a copy for at least three decades, the bookmark sitting sadly between page 36 and page 37. I was unprepared, however, for the experience of reading it. Reading Love in the Time of Cholera is a brilliant, immersive, frustrating and fabulous experience.
Set a hundred years ago, in a coastal city in Colombia, Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the story of show more Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, from the moment Florentino first catches sight of Fermina and falls madly, desperately in love, until they are both elderly. It's not an easy path; Florentino is awkward and weird and Fermina's father disapproves of the relationship. She marries another, and while his heart remains hers, he spends much of his time juggling a number of lovers as he waits for her to become free.
First published in 1985, Florentino's sexual ethics are presented as laudable and perhaps by the standards of the time and place, they are. But by modern standards, many of his relationships are coercive, if not blatantly abusive. This is the dead insect in the glorious feast of this book. Which is not to negate the importance or the beauty of this excellent book. I'm eager to read Marquez's other novels now. show less
Set a hundred years ago, in a coastal city in Colombia, Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the story of show more Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, from the moment Florentino first catches sight of Fermina and falls madly, desperately in love, until they are both elderly. It's not an easy path; Florentino is awkward and weird and Fermina's father disapproves of the relationship. She marries another, and while his heart remains hers, he spends much of his time juggling a number of lovers as he waits for her to become free.
First published in 1985, Florentino's sexual ethics are presented as laudable and perhaps by the standards of the time and place, they are. But by modern standards, many of his relationships are coercive, if not blatantly abusive. This is the dead insect in the glorious feast of this book. Which is not to negate the importance or the beauty of this excellent book. I'm eager to read Marquez's other novels now. show less
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