Love in the Time of Cholera

Love In the Time of Cholera was beautifully written. Marquez does a fantastic job of describing the crumbling grandeur of the fictive Caribbean riverside city in which the novel takes place. He not only allows you to see the city, but to feel what it is to build a life within such anachronism. Each of his main characters essentially lead lives that reflect the noble, regal, decomposing beauty of the city (perhaps region) in which the story takes place, for each dreams of greatness, each has intelligence and will enough to lead amazing, impactful lives in the greater world, but each, called by disingenuous nostalgia, return to a home that cradles their large lives in cultural and environmental decay.

The plot forgives, if not glorifies, show more the twisted logic of Florentino Ariza in the way he conducts his sexual life. Despite apparently being deeply, desperately in love with Fermina, Florentino has hundreds of love affairs in the fifty years the book spans, so many that he fills a small shelf with journals recording the histories of his trysts. He preys on emotionally vulnerable women, and pursues them fervently until he is bored of them, and moves on, though the narration softens and poeticizes this cyclical abandonment.

The driving love-plot of the story is poisonous. Florentino's fifty year obsession with Fermina Daza is painted as love. His insistence on being with her, disrespecting and disregarding the sovereignty of her clear and unwavering rejection of him, is disgusting and enraging, and perhaps even triggering to readers who have experienced similar obsessiveness at the hands of abusive partners. Similarly disgusting and triggering ((TRIGGER AND SPOILER WARNING)) a fourteen year old girl comes to live with Florentino as his ward, and he explicitly describes grooming her to become his sexual plaything. He is conscious of her extreme physical, mental and emotional youth, and in the description of one sexual encounter describes foreplay as playing a childish and silly game to teach her what to do. (I feel nauseous typing this). Like his other lovers, Florentino tosses this child aside when he is done with her, only allowing himself a few moments of remorse at the damage he willingly caused her. show less

I frequently recommend this book to people who are new to Marquez and magical realism. The story is lovely and engaging, but not as labyrinthine as some of Marquez's other books, and the elements of magical realism are subtle. It follows the lives of three central central characters: Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza, and Juvenal Urbino. They are caught in a passionate love triangle that is portrayed in a refreshingly different way. Fermina and Florentino fell in love young - she was a teenager and he was freshly out of school. To circumvent Fermina's strict father, they communicated with love letters and musical serenades and brief moments of meeting. Despite the lack of actual contact, or perhaps because of it, their love burned with an show more extreme intensity. When Fermina's father discovers what is happening, he whisks his daughter out of the city, on a long journey to her family's lands, but Fermina's desire for Florentino only grows. She and her father finally return to their Caribbean city on the coast, and Fermina is ecstatic to finally see her lover again. However, when they serendipitously meet in the market, Fermina looks at him and feels all her emotion blink away. She dismisses him in a few words, and then proceeds to weed all memory of him out of her life. She returns his letters and mementos, asks for the return of hers, and even purges her mind of thoughts of Florentino.

Florentino, for his part, is not able to accept her rejection. He falls into promiscuity as a way to escape his mental torment, but never commits to any woman in a permanent relationship. He believes that in this way, he is still faithful to Fermina. She, on the other hand, moves on entirely. When she meets Juvenal Urbino, a young and rich doctor who is smitten with her, it is not long before she accepts his wedding proposal. Even after she becomes a married woman, Florentino holds on to his hopes of being reunited. To make matters worse, he discovers that he actually likes the man married to his true love. He feels bad that this man needs to die so he can return to his Fermina Daza. Florentino does not try to kill Juvenal; he just waits for him to die.

While Fermina and Juvenal grow older, have children, and shape their city as the most influential couple, Florentino attends to his agenda. He wants to make himself worthy of Fermina, so he tries to improve his worldly status. His uncle gives him a chance in the family company, even though he was an illegitimate son. Through hard work, Florentino rises through the ranks of the river ship company, becoming wealthier and more powerful. He continues to have affairs with an astonishing number of women, and many of his escapades are described, while Fermina and Juvenal work through their issues. The biggest challenge to their marriage is the affair that takes Juvenal by surprise, and enrages Fermina. They manage to survive this calamity, however, and continue growing old together. Eventually, Juvenal does die, but not until he is an old man. The reader actually knows this event is coming, as the book begins with an account of Juvenal's death, before jumping back in time to when they were all young. After the funeral, Florentino once again declares his love to Fermina, and she sends him away in a fury because she has just started mourning her husband. Nonetheless, Florentino persists, and they enter their second courtship, this one markedly different from the one in their passionate teenage years. Over time, Fermina comes to love Florentino again. The story ends with the two of them on one of Florentino's river ships, sailing up and down the Magdalena river, with no thoughts of returning home.

Marquez is powerful voice in the literary world, and this is a wonderful novel with intense characters, a compelling story, and a lot of thematic resonance. I particularly liked Fermina Daza, with her strength and contradictions. Marquez presents her relationships with the two men in her life in way that is both natural and something beyond the norm; after all, this is magical realism, where supernatural elements are woven seamlessly into a mundane landscape. Florentino is an equally three-dimensional, fully realized person. Him I was not as fond of, however. His behavior with women is absolutely deplorable. Even at the end, I didn't think that his loyalty and sweet old person love with Fermina was a redemption for some of his previous actions. I preferred Juvenal Urbino. True, he had his great fall when he fell in love with a woman who wasn't his wife, and behaved even more poorly when he broke it off not due to moral obligations but out of weakness - but that was one mistake that took Urbino by surprise, as opposed to Florentino's constant and conscious exploitation of women. While Urbino is less developed than the other two main characters of the novel, the reader still is given access to his history and thoughts at crucial points throughout the story, so that he is not just a romantic foil, but an equally important person in this unusual love triangle. Perhaps it is not a love triangle at all, as the three people involved are not vying with each other, but rather with time and circumstances. Florentino makes no effort to steal Fermina away from Urbino, but bides his time, awaiting the man's death so he can make a proper claim. And Fermina doesn't feel torn between the two of them; she completely forgets Florentino for the majority of her life, contentedly absorbed in her marriage to Urbino. I read an intriguing commentary that posited the question of whether we are even meant to accept the ending as a sign of true love triumphing, or whether Marquez deliberately seduces us into accepting Florentino's ideas about love. After all, the man is a bit of a cad, who causes the deaths of at least two women, and repeatedly breaks the hearts or destroys the lives of others. Does he deserve to sail away with the woman he desired, after ruining so many others? The article posited that the book presents a myriad of different representations of love, durable and transient, often destructive, and the simplistic ending does not seem supported by the rest of the book. Not to mention the fact that love is constantly linked to cholera, a deadly and destructive disease. In my opinion, Marquez accepts both sides of love, its beauty and its ugliness, its goodness and its terror, its purity and its corruption.

In addition to the large theme of love and relationships, Marquez plays with many other ideas in this novel. Small notes on the church and religion crop up, the Caribbean setting is lovingly depicted, and rain and water are recurring motifs on ideas of change and cleansing. Beyond all these, bearing nearly as much weight as the plot lines about love, is the idea of aging and death. The book opens with a death; two, actually. Juvenal is called to examine the dead body of his friend, who had killed himself. As Juvenal ruminates on mortality and the letter that revealed his friend to be far different than he had thought him, Juvenal Urbino climbs a tree to retrieve his pet parrot and falls to his death. So the specter of death shadows all the events in the book, even the stories that recount the youth and early passions of the characters. As the novel progresses, we return to the idea of aging again and again, particularly in Florentino's thoughts and fears. He is convinced that he and Fermina are meant to be, but his aging body has the tendency to eat away at his conviction.

Every part of the story is filled with these nuanced ideas, surrounded by various symbols and sublime supernatural flourishes, and is rich and filling. This is a Marquez, so expect magical realism, but I would say that this book is the least heavy on magical realism of those that I have read. You can still find it, though: the creative way the narrative plays with time, Florentino's sunken treasure adventure, the human cry of a manatee, and so on. The narrative is more linear and easier to follow than Marquez's more complex stories, which is why I consider it the best introduction to his work. Even without the depths found in his books more intensely steeped in magical realism, his writing is still magical and engrossing, and the world he creates is immense and peopled with fantastic characters. I love Marquez's books, and this is one of his best known and easiest to read. For anyone questioning whether or not to read a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the answer is always yes. show less

Interesting. There's a lot to dig into with Florentino's love for Fermina. On the surface it's a love story with Florentino pledging himself to Fermina and never giving up on their love, but when looking at Florentino's actions he's a hypocrite and a liar. He says he remains chaste for her, but his version of chaste is to have over 600 lovers during the course of his life while never allowing himself to feel any deeper feelings for them, which is certainly not a definition of "chaste" that Fermina would agree with. And even that's a lie! Florentino most certainly does have other women he loves (though for some of them I am putting big sarcasm quotes around the word "love" there), though he doesn't realize himself that he's being show more hypocritical. The worst of this is América, a child he grooms and has sex with when she's around 14 and he is in his 70s. The book makes a point to say that she resembles how Fermina looked when Fermina and Florentino first met. So the surface is one story, but the underlying message of the novel is much more cynical with regards to the concept of "love." show less

I hesitated between four or five stars, but the lingering feeling it leaves me after finishing it and the sorrow I feel for not having an extra chapter makes me believe a full five star rating is in order here.

There is so much love in this book! The word love is also used in almost every paragraph on every page.

Granted, not everything Márquez calls 'love' is worthy of the name (paedophilia, rape, stalking, ...), but love is definitely present in all its many forms in this book.

And it's so funny at the same time! Masterfully, we get to know about the intertwining lives of three main characters over the course of about seventy years on the turn of the 18th into the 19th century in an undefined, post-colonial Caribbean land. Time, love show more and age are perhaps the three most important themes of the tale, and they are carefully dissected and turned inside out with a tender touch of humour.

I loved this story! I just wish I knew enough Spanish to read it in its original language. 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 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 show more 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

So, the only way to read this and not absolutely hate it is to think of it like you’re reading You by Caroline Kepnes. Listen, the main character is not redeemable or redeemed here. He is a horrible person. He is a narcissistic stalking pedophile rapist. This is not a love story. It is a look into the mind of a terrible human who sees women as only how useful they are and who stalks an idealized version of a girl he saw and communicated with when she was a teenager for 50 something years after even though she doesn’t reciprocate and is married, etc. Marquez’s comments on women are disturbing at minimum. His comments on rape are also disturbing. One character was raped on the beach in the dark by a man whose face she never saw and show more he writes that she spends her time looking for him because of how good the sex was. This is not what happens in a violent sexual assault by a stranger. This was written in the 80s too, not back in some older time where you could possibly explain away SOME of the comments. I mean, looking at descriptions of his writing, Marquez has at least three pieces where girls of 12 or 14 are taken by men that could be their grandfathers. I find him really really really disturbing now. Anyways… the writing was dense, but fine, but if you’re looking for a love story - look elsewhere. show less

Love as a disease, patience as a weapon.

After reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, I wasn't sure anything else by García Márquez could move me the same way. Then I met Florentino Ariza.

Love in the Time of Cholera is not a magical realism novel. There are no flying carpets, no ascensions to heaven, no rains of yellow flowers. The magic here is entirely human: the obsessive, patient, ridiculous, and strangely noble capacity of one man to wait. For fifty-one years, nine months, and four days.

What it is: Florentino Ariza, a romantic and impoverished telegraph operator, falls in love with Fermina Daza, a proud, practical, and beautiful young woman. They court through letters. She agrees to marry him. Then she sees him in person, has a show more moment of clarity, and sends him away. She marries a wealthy, respectable doctor instead. Florentino waits. He sleeps with over six hundred women (he keeps a ledger), but he insists his heart belongs only to Fermina. Fifty-one years later, her husband dies. Florentino, now an old man, walks into her house and says: "I have waited for this opportunity for fifty-one years, nine months, and four days. Once again, I reiterate my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love."

That's the novel. It's a love story, but not a romantic one. Not really.

The brilliance:

1. The inversion of the love story. García Márquez spends the first third of the novel detailing the marriage of Fermina and Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a "perfect" union that is comfortable, respectable, and quietly empty. By the time Florentino returns, you understand that his obsessive, impractical love might actually be the real thing. Or it might be madness. The novel never decides, which is the point.

2. Florentino Ariza is impossible to like, but impossible to forget. He is pathetic, calculating, and deeply selfish. He seduces a young girl (who eventually commits suicide because of him). He carries on affairs while declaring himself a virgin of the heart. He is a parody of a romantic hero. And yet, when he sits across from Fermina at age seventy-six, trembling, you feel the weight of his waiting. García Márquez makes you confront something uncomfortable: that love and obsession are not always distinguishable.

3. The prose. As always, every sentence breathes. Descriptions of the river, the parrot, the old age of the characters, it's rendered with a tenderness that makes the grotesque feel beautiful. There's a scene where Florentino watches Urbino and Fermina at the opera, and the jealousy is rendered not as rage but as a slow, cold patience. Devastating.

4. The ending. The final chapter takes place on a riverboat sailing under a yellow quarantine flag (cholera). The captain asks how long they should sail. Florentino has spent fifty-one years waiting. He answers: "Forever." It's perfect. It's also terrifying.

The stumbles (honest critiques):

1. The pacing is glacial. This is not a novel for people who need plot momentum. García Márquez luxuriates in digressions: the doctor's parrot, the love affairs of a minor character, the history of the river. If you found the middle of The Wise Man's Fear slow, this will test you.

2. Florentino is a predator. The novel treats his affair with the young girl, América Vicuña (a teenager under his guardianship), as a minor subplot. She is devastated when he abandons her for Fermina. She commits suicide. And the narrative moves on with barely a pause. For many readers, this is unforgivable. García Márquez does not condemn Florentino, and that silence is a real flaw.

3. It romanticizes suffering. Florentino's love is presented as pure because it is patient. But patience is also stubbornness, possession, refusal to accept reality. The novel asks you to admire a man who refused to live his life because he was waiting for someone else's to end.

4. No magical realism. This is not a flaw for everyone, but if you came from One Hundred Years expecting levitating priests, you'll be disappointed. This is a realist novel, grounded in the mundane details of aging, disease, and social expectation.

Who should read this:

Readers who want to understand how García Márquez writes about love without illusions.
People who appreciate slow, character-driven literary fiction.
Those who can hold multiple truths: that Florentino is both a fool and a romantic, both a predator and a lover.

Who should skip it:

Anyone triggered by grooming or exploitation of minors (the América Vicuña subplot is not minor).
Readers who need a sympathetic protagonist.
People who hate novels about waiting.

Final verdict:

Love in the Time of Cholera is a masterpiece of ambiguous love. It's also a deeply uncomfortable book. García Márquez refuses to tell you whether Florentino Ariza is a hero or a delusional old man. He forces you to sit with that question for four hundred pages. The prose is stunning, the themes are rich, but the silence around Florentino's predation is a genuine stain.

Four stars. For the language, the patience, the unforgettable ending. But I cannot give it five, because the novel asks me to forgive something I'm not sure deserves forgiveness. show less