~~ Please acquaint yourselves with Florentino Ariza, an obsessive love sick man, who wants to spend his whole life immersed in thoughts of his beloved. He stalks his lover in parks pretending to read on a bench as she passes by. Love makes him sick with apprehension. He is given to eating flowers and drinking cologne that remind him of his love. His love is an illness transcending the physical to the psychological.
At work, he is incapable of writing a business letter; as they all read like love letters. He willfully endures physical and emotional pain as he longs for her. He revels in his suffering, he feels martyred in love. His sole token of protest when she gets married elsewhere is yet another violin serenade under her balcony. He awaits his love to bear fruit and patiently awaits her husbands death, to propose to her once again.
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~~ Please acquaint yourselves with Dr. Juvenal Urbino, and Fermina Daza. At eighty, he dies in a bizarre manner confessing to his wife of fifty years, Fermina, that he loved her more than anything else in the whole world. While she at that very moment suddenly realizes that she had spent her whole life with the wrong person.
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These are the tragi-comic, real characters of Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Spanish novel ’Amor en Los Tiempos del Colera’ translated into English as Love in The Time of Cholera – a chronicle of a love triangle - presenting different ways of understanding and experiencing love. A maturely written, often humorous novel, rich in ideas, language and humanity.
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Love - in all its forms
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Love in the Time of Cholera presents love in many forms, each of which are to be relished in all their richness to lead a complete life.
~ Love is Pragmatic: Are vows of adolescent idiocy to be honored?
~ Love Waits: A lover waits for his love for as long as possible, this wait incidentally spans over 52 years.
~ Love is Silent: The development of a love affair through glances, gestures, waiting, following, pining, blushing, is etched out most beautifully, making you want to be a lost puppy in love all over again.
~ Love is Painful: It is a very truthful depiction of the pangs of unrequited, unfulfilled love.
~ Love is Theatrical: This is an era when men in love serenaded women under their balconies playing violins and at times even pianos
Also, Love is debauchery, innocence, carnality, a defeat, a victory. Experience all these forms in these magical 350 pages. It charts how love blooms from adolescent puppy love to a mature love between aged individuals more accepting of each others faults. Besides, it catalogues the plodding and meaningless existence in a loveless marriage, its dull routines and unspoken bitterness
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Sick, with Love
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The manner in which the theme of love as a plague of cholera runs throughout the novel and ends beautifully; makes Love in The Time of Cholera worth a repeat read. Marquez, presents lovesickness in the literal sense. Often Florentino’s symptoms of love are equated and mistaken with those of cholera.
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A Magically Serene Novel
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez is as usual in ruthless control of his readers, his writing has a maniacal serenity that soaks you into itself. This brilliantly crafted novel is written in a modular and non-linear format. Slowly in small doses characters are revealed and events that happen early on in the novel are explained much later. It frequently rushes into different times in its characters pasts with a graceful fluidity.
The central theme of unending love runs through the course of this novel in various guises of joy, melancholia, and humour.
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Lush, Poetic and Humorous
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This novel contains one of the most bizarre death settings I’ve ever read, and is throughout laced with just the right bits of humor to keep the reader in a breezy, light mood despite the somber and heavy subject.
The section in which a first night is equated with a medical lesson, Florentino’s mother and the family doctor mistaking his love sickness with the symptoms of cholera are simply hilarious. Marquez has a remarkable ability to make even medical case histories and sanitation audits sound romantically magical.
The prose is lush, sensual and poetic, giving thoughtful insights into human relations, marriage, old age, companionship and co-habitation.
Florentino is a hero that would win any woman’s heart and would delight any man committed to his woman. This is a must for all booklovers who have experienced all the pleasures and pains of love.
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