Candi's Reviews > Love in the Time of Cholera

“It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”

Love is not patient, love is not kind. It’s envious, it’s boastful, it’s proud. It’s most definitely self-seeking. This book takes the illusion of pure love and turns it upside down. It’s absolutely brilliant. I basked in the beauty of individual sentences and marveled at the epic scope. Don’t expect a romantic, traditional love story or a loveable character to fall for, because you won’t find those things here. What you will find is a sometimes humorous yet painfully truthful story about obsession, marriage, aging, sex, and death. I have to admit that the honesty of Márquez’s brutal points occasionally made me laugh out loud. All of this is set in the sultry heat of a Caribbean coastal city at the turn of the nineteenth century during ‘the time of cholera’.

“At nightfall, at the oppressive moment of transition, a storm of carnivorous mosquitoes rose out of the swamps, and a tender breath of human shit, warm and sad, stirred the certainty of death in the depths of one’s soul.”

Stories about obsession and rather unsavory characters always fascinate me, but I’m aware these elements don’t appeal to every reader. Here we have a young man, Florentino Ariza, who believes he has fallen in love with the adolescent Fermina Daza. When he can’t have her, he spends the next several decades with the intent to grab what he failed to obtain during his youth. Fermina, in the meantime, has married a renowned physician, Dr. Juvenal Urbino. We spend the next three hundred odd pages immersed in the lives of these three (plus some secondary characters) with occasional time shifts that are mastered flawlessly. The idea of “love” is scrutinized without a single reservation on the part of Márquez – both that of the married as well as the unwed. Fermina and Dr. Urbino have their ups and downs; while Florentino has his mad affairs to fill the time before hazarding another attempt at his previously failed conquest.

“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”

“Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.”

Nothing about this novel is sentimental; rather, it’s a bit tongue in cheek, in my opinion. There are no answers to the question of true love to be found in its pages. If your experience is anything like mine, you’ll nod your head a lot, shake it from time to time, and smirk every now and then. You’ll absolutely admire the prose. You’ll hungrily go looking for the next Gabriel García Márquez book.

“… nothing in this world was more difficult than love.”