Love in The Time of Cholera (1985)

Marquez is such a masterful spinner of words that I could sometimes forget the tedious pace of narration towards the end. Still a wonderful meditation on love and its many forms - definitely readable. ( )

I have had One Hundred Years of Solitude on my to-read list for a long time. Supposedly it's a "classic" every person should read. So, when this book, by the same author, came up as an available "read-alike" on my Overdrive account (I'm on the waiting list for 100 Years), I decided to give it a try. I finished it only because I had no other book on audio and I have a long commute.
Yawn! I will not be reading 100 Years, I don't think I'll ever read another book by this author. I found this one to be unnecessarily graphic and misogynistic and, frankly, boring. I did not like the characters, nor find them remotely believable. Not recommended. ( )

exhausted... ( )

An overwhelming book about a man named Florentino who pines after the same woman for fifty years. At the beginning, it seems his affections are returned. They write letters to each other and plan to marry. Then, she calls it off, claiming their love was only an illusion. She marries someone else, a rich and well-liked doctor. Florentino is despondent. He has sex with anything that moves in a futile attempt to forget her. Then her husband dies, and he decides to try again.

This book was more than a little ridiculous. It was over-the-top and there was way too much sex for my liking. I had to skim past pages and pages of sex scenes. I was glad when it was over.

That said, there was something about it that I liked. Fermina was my favorite character; I loved how dignified she was and how adept she was at maintaining the house. To me, she seemed to have all the qualities a woman should have. I can see what Florentino saw in her. I did not like Florentino's character so much, though I do respect the author for giving us such a flawed protagonist. ( )

In a recent conversation I agreed emphatically with a young woman who said that she would no longer spend time reading books she didn't like. I approved of this philosophy, because reading should be a pleasure, we all have different tastes, and I can't stand literary prescriptivists. I can't stand the people who act as if your choice of reading doesn't "count" if it's not smarty-pants, unreadable, "high" literary bullshit. This sounds disingenuous, I'm sure, given what my library on this website looks like, and given the fact that although I called this book "tar" in another review, I still slogged through till the very end. I'm not very good at not finishing what (books) I start.

I found the story flat, because Fermina Daza's appeal is impossible to reason out, because Florentino Ariza is in love with the desire to be deeply in love, and because the romanticizing and eventual success of overcoming "unrequited love" is almost as uninteresting as it is toxic.

Why did I read it all the way through when I disliked it so much, and when I only came across more repellent anecdotes the longer I read? I think because I recognised it as an Important Work (however loaded that very concept is, let alone the books contained within it) and needed to be able to talk about it and tell others about the fundamental problems of this book. It's coloured my response to [b:One Hundred Years of Solitude|320|One Hundred Years of Solitude|Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327881361s/320.jpg|3295655], for which I looked up my own review today and felt surprised at how generous I'd been with it. ( )