Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is a wonderful book on love, time, and the endurance of the human heart. Set in a lush Caribbean city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the novel follows the lifelong connection between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. What begins as an intense youthful romance is abruptly severed, sending their lives in separate directions—yet Florentino remains steadfast in his devotion, waiting for decades in the hope that fate will bring them together once more. Marquez’s prose is nothing short of mesmerizing. His ability to blend lyrical storytelling with profound philosophical reflections makes the novel a deeply immersive experience. Love, in his vision, is not just an emotion but a force that evolves, perseveres, and sometimes even deceives. The novel doesn’t romanticize love in the traditional sense; instead, it explores its complexities—obsession, passion, companionship, etc. And the ways in which time reshapes our understanding of it. Beyond its central love story, the novel paints a vivid portrait of an era marked by social change, medical advancements, and the passage of generations. Marquez’s characters are flawed yet unforgettable, their desires and disappointments rendered with striking honesty. The narrative moves at a deliberate, almost meditative pace, which may not appeal to those looking for fast-moving plot twists. For readers willing to work with its rhythms, the reward is a fantastic story. Ultimately, Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel that lingers in the mind long after the final page. It challenges conventional notions of love and destiny, offering a deeply human exploration of what it means to love someone across a lifetime.

This novel, written by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a period piece, set in a Caribbean port city (widely cited as Cartagena) in the late 19th and early 20th century. At its heart, it is the story of a tragic love triangle, involving Spanish maiden Fermina Daza, her first ardent suitor Florentino Ariza and her subsequent husband of over 50 years, Dr. Juvenal Urbino. The story begins with the twilight years of Fermina and Urbino and his accidental death. Ariza then makes his appearance, professing his undying and faithful love over the previous half century. We are then transported back to the childhood and subsequent courtships of the actors culminating in the marriage between Fermina and Juvenal and the heartbreak suffered by Florentino. Of primary interest to me were both the cultural and societal backdrop painted by the author. Late 19th century Spanish customs and mores were far different than those of today, with the Catholic Church playing an overarching role. Class and status were rigid and conscientiously adhered to, to the detriment of young Florentino. While the writing is certainly first rate and the imagery very effective, it is at times a little more florid than I generally prefer. There are long stretches of little or no action as the author expounds on the clothing worn by the actors, the weather, the landscape, the emotions and feelings of all involved. Not usually my cup of tea, but not beyond my capacity to appreciate, philistine that I am. That having been said, I found myself warming to the story, and perhaps becoming more comfortable with the style and substance relayed by the author. By its conclusion, I was very favorably disposed toward the novel. I did have one minor quibble however, and it revolved around Florentino's prodigious sexual appetite and conquests. Soon after the heartbreak of Fermina's marriage to Urbino, it is revealed that in the subsequent fifty years, Florentino conducted an astonishing 622 affairs, well documented in 25 notebooks. While it is not inconceivable that a fellow could sleep with 622 different women in fifty years, it is noted that the 622 "affairs" were not simply one night stands, or visits with whores, but "affairs of the heart". This seems to be wholly unrealistic. Taking into account the population of the city itself, the strict Catholic mores in place and the simple math, it seems highly unlikely that any man could have accumulated such an impressive record. Maybe I'm simply not trying hard enough.

I was never going to read this, but an old friend from high school said it was his favorite book. I got it for a penny here, why not? And I am glad I did. The story of Florentino and Fermina over fifty years is not dull or predictable. They fall in love as teenagers but that gets all sundered and she marries a rich doctor and lives in a big house in the sweltering tropics of Colombia. Fermina has kids and lives as best she can, but her rich husband is a disappointment. Oh not that he is boring- the book shows him as a character in his own right which makes it fun to read. You get engrossed in all the gross goings-on in this town. So Florentino does not wait in a monastery for his love to become a widow, No- he goes out and beds as many women as he can without loving them or committing to them. In fact, he is a sleazy jerk. Not to give too much away but he turns into a dirty old man before Fermina is available again. Not a likable character but not boring in the least, you really want to see what becomes of him. Also, it's a quest you want to see fulfilled. So the book is rich with imagery and glorious poetic writing and makes you feel like you are there in sweaty Colombia as these people live their messy lives. Worth the effort.

Marquez combines the genius of Chaucer's unreliable narrators with Milton's mockery of the epic protagonist. He has even managed to dupe his reviewer into believing in Florentino Ariza's eternal declaration of love for Fermina Daza is praiseworthy! His masterful mockery of that declaration through the unfolding of the story is at least as good as Fitzgerald's flattening of Gatsby's idealist notions of his love under the cold, profane moneyed world of Tom and Daisy. While Fitzgerald flattens idealism, this novel flattens the shallow ego-centric infatuation that many call love in this generation. A little observation reveals indicators of Marquez’s clear derision of ‘love’: 1) The narrator provides us an unmediated juxtaposition of two contrasting definitions of love: On one side, the narrator praises love as a thread of kindness and companionship woven through a tapestry of misunderstandings, trials, and temptations. Acts of kindness, forgiveness, and sanctification mark the story of Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza. On the other side, the same narrator praises love as a self-deceived ideal that is essentially projected onto Fermina, without recognition of who she is at heart. Florentino lives this love out in such a way that he convinces himself that acts of perfidy are actually acts of idolatrous devotion. A narrator who cannot distinguish between these two notions of love ought to evoke suspicion in any reader who has half a brain! 2) Florentino Ariza is like Gatsby gone promiscuously mad. 622 'love' affairs to preserve 'love'? The joke is on anyone who will believe it. A Gatsby who can't see the real Daisy for his idolization of her as a goddess is combined with a Marquis De Sade who takes every opportunity to objectify human beings as sexual objects. Ariza is a sexually deviant version of Jekyl and Hyde. He is so full of excrement, that he curtails his first visit to a widowed Fermina in order to gain relief by defecating in his own pants. 3) The path of fragmentation Ariza leaves in his wake is indescribably horrific. His 'love' affairs don't sizzle so much as they fizzle into a bleak, hopeless void covered only by the pretense of a shared desire to break things off. Percy Walker’s Binx would describe this as "dead, dead, dead." The pretense of 'love affairs' being anything but bleakly mechanical fornications is clearly shattered by Ariza's relationships with three women: 1) Sara Noriega, who will not hide her hostility at feeling used, 2) Olimpia Zuleta, who reveals the real cost of Ariza's campaign of careless seduction when her husband murders her, and 3) the capstone molestation of a 14-year-old school girl (one who is placed in his trust!) when he is in his 70s! Ariza’s selfishishness ends the girl's life by suicide while he still chases after his 'ideal' with only a passing thought for the tragic death of this girl he himself ruined! He is incapable of any meaningful attachment or responsability to the women he has screwed in so many ways. He loves no one, not even Fermina, but only loves his ideal of Fermina. His love is, in reality, nothing but an obtuse, self-centric, hellish lust twisted within the guise of idealistic love. 4) The final clue comes with a river boat that is stranded near the swamps. How fitting to end such a life in the stagnant, malodorous swamps of life! 'Love' that is merely a correlated amalgamation of so many discrete sexual experiences has no destination and no route out of stagnancy. There is no pilgrimage, no journey, no hope of redemption or even return to communion/community. As Edith Wharton's Countess Olenska told us, illicit love, for all its excitement, ends in a dark alley of bitter disappointments and disillusionment (the urban version of the stagnant swamp). And so our protagonist, like Milton's Lucifer, for all his boasting of achieving a great ideal, ends his life as a fragmented, isolated, impotent old man who drags his companions with him into the quagmire of hell. Marquez's genius for building the narrative by shifting time and individual character narratives in order to provide contrasts not only between love and lust as ideals, but also the inner struggle between love and lust in the individual, keeps the reader in a state of inner conflict. The attempt to decipher just what love is and is not builds in tension just like the building of crisis in ancient Greek theater. This playing with/on the reader's expectation thus reveals the reader's own flawed view of love as much as it reveals the flaws of the characters. You, the reader, are exposed! The final catharsis itself doesn't provide resolution so much as it exposes the reader's own conflict between reckless escape from community (fragmentation) in order to follow personal fullfillment and return to community (wholeness). This is somewhat similar to the unsettling relief one might encounter at the end of Oedipus Rex. The ending leaves us only with the daringly haunting question of what love is. This is assuredly better than presuming the trite answers that pervade contemporary culture(s), but one sometimes yearns for a Chaucer who not only poses daunting questions, but has the courage to answer them. But alas! That type of genius finds few appreciative minds given the spirit of the present age.

After I finished the book and found the ending wanting, I asked myself, what did Márquez wish to accomplish by writing Love in the Time of Cholera? I've decided, in his godless way, he wanted to explore the inconsistencies, weaknesses and occasional beauty of romantic love. Does he accomplish these objectives? Well... (spoilers ahead) - The lives of the antagonist/protagonists feel existentially futile by the end of the novel, and their romance even more so aided by the metaphoric, cadaver-infested Magdalena. Sympathy for the pedophilic Florentino is at an all-time low during the final boat chapter where his fifty-one years-in-the-making romance with Fermina culminates in an uncomfortable bedroom scene and an indefinite journey down the river. Fermina plays her part well and is intelligent and admirable, even caring at times, although not the sharpest cookie during her widowhood. My guess is, if she had known Florentino's obsessive-compulsive means to get her on the boat and his latest affairs with a child who has now committed suicide, she would have in no way consented to let him love her. What kind of love is this anyway??? Even with the awareness that Márquez is using exaggerated techniques to drive home Florentino's desire for Fermina, I don't believe anyone sees this romance as mature love, nor beautiful love, nor sexy love, nor cute, grandparent warm-fuzzy love. It feels like Fermina, in her old age, has been duped by a madman. Even the title of the novel makes one wonder if Márquez wasn't actually a pessimist and saw love like a disease. Because, most definitely, Florentino is a sick, sick man in love with love and a childhood fantasy. He has a sex addiction and is a predator using all women to help him survive so that one day he can make love to the one woman that he really never knew nor knows - Fermina Daza. I enjoy Márquez's ability to weave a fantasy setting that echos the real-life beauty and cacophony of Latin America. Sadly, the male antagonist/protagonist Florentino in Love in the Time of Cholera feels like a dated, machismo, latin misunderstanding of what constitutes a healthy, love-stricken male. I wish Florentino had been written a little differently. There are sentences in the novel that echo very honest sentiments about life, particularly those paragraphs about widowhood. I do not regret reading the story, but it fails to earn my respect. This book is definitely not as likeable and brilliant as 100 Years of Solitude. P.S. - While not a commentary on romance, I found Márquez's view of marriage through the character of Juvenal Urbino interesting. For Juvenal Urbino marriage doesn't have to be about love, it should be about stability. Marry the person who will make you most stable, that person who best compensates for your weaknesses and allows you to be viewed in public as the version of yourself you want to be. Very unromantic, but none the less a tactic used by many men in the upper classes of Latin America, even today.

“The words I am about to express: They now have their own crowned goddess." –Leandro Diaz Love in the Time of Cholera is not a book that can be taken like a shot of tequila—slammed down then sit back and feel the burn. No, no, this book is like a fine aged wine. I swirled it around the glass and drank in the beauty of his prose. The delicious writing slipped through my brain and settled into my core until I was on fire. I had to commit, to give Gabriel García Márquez my undivided attention. Love in the Time of Cholera is about passion. Not just desire in love, but many different kinds of craving. The kind of intensity that consumes the soul in a way that will never let go. Many stories are going on at once in this tale. They all swirl around love and loss, be it a person, money, or a life not fully lived. Márquez spoke of the unfathomable pain that can make people go completely mad when their yearnings are not fulfilled. On the other side of the coin, that kind of hunger can drive a person to succeed beyond anything they had ever imagined. The novel takes place between 1880 and 1930 in an unnamed port city in the Caribbean. A Cholera outbreak devastates the town. Can the new doctor, Juvenal Urbino, who follows in his father’s footsteps, make the changes needed to keep another at bay? We are also introduced to Fermina Daza, and Florentino Ariza who suffer from young love, as well as so many other brilliant characters as the lives in this city unfold in all their magnificent splendor. Márquez uses foreshadowing exquisitely to draw the line of where you might be going but is that truly the destination? If you don’t keep reading, you’ll never know. I can’t bring myself to give away spoilers. The story is too beautiful, too heartbreaking, too everything, not to read. Márquez will seduce you if you allow him, but you must give yourself over to the Latino heat of the sweltering Caribbean. You won’t be sorry.

It was highly regarded as The Top 100 Best Novels of the BBC. Funnily enough, people recognized "One Hundreds Years of Solitude" as his best. Even the former US president like Barack Obama admired that novel. But after I read both novels, I must say that I love this novel more than the admired ones. Since after reading this novel, I have bought two more versions of this book. Maybe it because I waited to read this novel for three years and known this novel for more than 4 years. The reason for my patience, it might be because I know that every book has an answer, something to guide and strive for. Maybe it wasn't a good timing for this book, until now... Timeless novel, as we might not travelled by carriages & ships, might not send a love letter or even an emerald tiaras to our affairs. But some of the stories and terms are up-to-date and related. Even the novel title is related, since Cholera is a plague that needs to be quarantined and vanished by itself with no vaccines in the of the book, same as the infamous Corona Virus- The perfectly lovable characters. The jealousy, envy, and betrayal. The passionate love affair ended in a private catastrophe. His words are dreamy, enchanted, and fabulous like the eyes of an angel waiting for me to arrive. At first, before reading this book, I always thought of myself as Florentino Ariza, but after getting to know both characters I think I'm the perfect combination of Dr. Juvenal Urbino & Florentino Ariza. But after half the book, I know deep down that I'm more Dr. Urbino than Mr. Ariza, which I fell the sense of relief and calm till this day. After a great deal of breakups, my heart is still broken, but my soul is at peace. Let the time pass, and we will see what it brings, by the time she unburdened herself, someone had turn off the moon.

I can see why Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature. The book has a very unique style. It is more like painting a picture with words than telling a story in the usual sense. In a painting you can move your focus, look around and see different parts quickly, then maybe study some details. Similarly, the scenes in the book are not in chronological order. In fact, the first scene is actually near the end temporally (so don't worry that the next paragraph of this review is giving anything away, you will find these things near the beginning of the book). The author gives a glimpse of various points in time, and then fills in details as the book progresses. And, it is more than just a picture of these characters' lives, it is a picture of a time and a place. At the end of the book, you will feel like you have lived there. For most of the book, I thought it was a tragedy not a love story. I disagree with many reviewers, it was not a book about unrequited love, because Florentino Ariza was never in love. Even though Florentino Ariza was successful in a worldly sense, I felt sorry for him. He never loved Fermina Daza, they were never much more than acquaintances. He wasted his entire life being in love with the idea of being in love, but never understanding what love is. Love is not a disease, it is not infatuation, it is not lust, it is not an extreme form of like. For most of his life, his love was about himself, even when he was proud to be suffering for it. Only at the very end did he realize that love is about the one being loved, it is something you do; love is a verb, not a state of being. Also, only at the end of the book did I really understand the title of the book.