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abeljquintero's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.25
thaurisil's review against another edition
2.0
The book starts in Colombia, on the last day of Juvenal Urbino's life. He is an elderly eminent physician, and he falls to his death from a ladder. We then go back in time with Fermina Daza, his wife, who, as a young girl, exchanged forbidden letters with Florentino Ariza, a boy infatuated with her. They never talk, but through their letters plan marriage. Fermina eventually breaks up with him and marries Juvenal, a rich charming doctor who has got it all going for him. Over the years, Juvenal and Fermina become the couple if the town, heading social initiatives and gaining honour from all sides, while each grows steadily more dependent on the other. Florentino, determined to eventually win Fermina back, keeps himself single, rises to the top of the River Company of the Caribbean, but sleeps with hundreds of women. Fifty years after they broke up, Juvenal dies, and Florentino renews his courtship. The book ends with the two on a boat, in love, planning to sail "forever".
At one point, Fermina complains about a play, "My God, this is longer than sorrow!" That sums up my feelings about the book. I'll concede it is lyrical, and beautifully written and translated. But just as Florentino's hyperbolical lyricism doesn't cut any ice with Fermina, so does Marquez's flowing prose and exaggerated magical realism tire me out. Florentino Ariza's whole character tires me out. I preferred Juvenal Urbino. His love wasn't passionate, but it was steady, reliable, and real. At one point, Marquez described how on waking up every morning, Juvenal would make noises as he dressed to annoy Fermina, and Fermina would pretend to sleep, though both knew she was awake, until she gave in and bitterly complained. Marquez explained this petty domestic quarrel as something both of them needed. That was insightful and so true – many old couples have trivial arguments, some of which blow up pretty big, and nobody likes them, but sometimes they become such a major part of the relationship that each party feels lost without them. None of this was found in Florentino's passion for Fermina, which in its undying intensity appeared unreal.
Interestingly, Florentino is a sex maniac. In the fifty years that he can't have Fermina, he has sex with over 200 women, and Marquez details his exploits. His final affair is with a 14 year old girl placed under his care who commits suicide when he loses interest in her for Fermina. He's not your typical pure, faithful lover. Why would Marquez create such a character? Possibly, he's trying to make Florentino more real. A man with so much passion for a woman he can't have can't bear that unfulfilled passion for 50 years, he needs an outlet for it, and Florentino's is in his other women. Or Marquez might be making a statement that the true measure of love is not sex, which would explain why Juvenal also has an affair too, and that society's and Fermina's belief that sex with another woman makes you unfaithful creates unnecessary tension. Or perhaps Marquez is implying that it is possible to love many women and yet love one woman more than the rest of them, and by showing that Florentino cares for many women yet desires Fermina most of all he emphasizes Florentino overwhelming passion for Fermina.
At one point, Fermina complains about a play, "My God, this is longer than sorrow!" That sums up my feelings about the book. I'll concede it is lyrical, and beautifully written and translated. But just as Florentino's hyperbolical lyricism doesn't cut any ice with Fermina, so does Marquez's flowing prose and exaggerated magical realism tire me out. Florentino Ariza's whole character tires me out. I preferred Juvenal Urbino. His love wasn't passionate, but it was steady, reliable, and real. At one point, Marquez described how on waking up every morning, Juvenal would make noises as he dressed to annoy Fermina, and Fermina would pretend to sleep, though both knew she was awake, until she gave in and bitterly complained. Marquez explained this petty domestic quarrel as something both of them needed. That was insightful and so true – many old couples have trivial arguments, some of which blow up pretty big, and nobody likes them, but sometimes they become such a major part of the relationship that each party feels lost without them. None of this was found in Florentino's passion for Fermina, which in its undying intensity appeared unreal.
Interestingly, Florentino is a sex maniac. In the fifty years that he can't have Fermina, he has sex with over 200 women, and Marquez details his exploits. His final affair is with a 14 year old girl placed under his care who commits suicide when he loses interest in her for Fermina. He's not your typical pure, faithful lover. Why would Marquez create such a character? Possibly, he's trying to make Florentino more real. A man with so much passion for a woman he can't have can't bear that unfulfilled passion for 50 years, he needs an outlet for it, and Florentino's is in his other women. Or Marquez might be making a statement that the true measure of love is not sex, which would explain why Juvenal also has an affair too, and that society's and Fermina's belief that sex with another woman makes you unfaithful creates unnecessary tension. Or perhaps Marquez is implying that it is possible to love many women and yet love one woman more than the rest of them, and by showing that Florentino cares for many women yet desires Fermina most of all he emphasizes Florentino overwhelming passion for Fermina.
kaylienicole's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
cerilla's review against another edition
4.0
Se podría haber llamado también "La vejez en los tiempos del cólera" porque es un tema que se trata de principio a fin y porque no tengo claro que nadie estuviera enamorado de nadie (lo de Florentino Ariza es obsesión de pagafantas y no tiene salvación). Aunque quizá se titula así porque representa distintos tipos de amor y los da todos por válidos. Incluso los que no debería. No digo más.
Pero qué bonito escribe García Márquez: con mucho colorido, enlazando anécdotas que acaban formando una historia compleja con cambios de perspectiva y metido de lleno en la cultura de la región. Lo lees y lees Hispanoamérica.
Pero qué bonito escribe García Márquez: con mucho colorido, enlazando anécdotas que acaban formando una historia compleja con cambios de perspectiva y metido de lleno en la cultura de la región. Lo lees y lees Hispanoamérica.
elliehamilton38's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
drdolphinphd's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pedophilia and Rape
cduarte's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
spenkevich's review against another edition
3.0
‘The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.’
For fifty-one years, nine months and four days, Florentino Ariza pines for Fermina Daza in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, a sweeping epic of love, plagues, and an awareness we are all marching towards death. Though known for his expertise in magical realism, here Marquez opts for a more direct approach in realism, chronicling the many years of unrequited love and allowing the magic of everyday reality to be its own fantastical journey through life. This is easily achieved by Marquez, a writer with prose of such intense beauty and a gift for commanding complex plots in an engaging manner. The book is dense, but in the way a diamond is dense, the prose compounding insights and observations through each perfectly written sentence (though it can be a bit of a slog at times). What results is that, in a book about both love and illness, we find love to appear as illness itself, with Florentino seeming to take pleasure in his own suffering. Marquez creates a very Humbert Humbert-esque character from him, with his reprehensible actions not condemned through the narration and allowing for a dynamic look at obsession in love as well as the impetus behind perseverance.
Something I enjoy with Marquez is how surprising his books can be. The novel begins with Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who we quickly learn dies, though much of the beginning of this book surrounds his relationship with his wife, Fermina. It’s the subversion of expectations of narrative that make this book quite fun, although it is lacking in the overt humor that we find in most of his works. Though with the Doctor we are thrust into a major theme of the book: the inevitability of death.
We see the doctor finding his body and mind becoming strangers to one another and throughout the novel, one dealing with cholera, we are constantly aware everyone has an expiration date.
‘She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.’
This is key for Florentino, as he suffers in love for Fermina as he ages. The ending, which is beautiful, becomes both a revisit of young love as well as a reversal, with the act of lovemaking focusing on their aging bodies as they attempt to sail off into a reclamation of eternal youth. It is as if in his self-imposed suffering he finds himself most alive, and—such as when he is jailed for serenading Fermina—reveling in his impression of himself as a martyr. Marquez excels at symbolism and imagery, with flowers being the most profound of them in this novel, and there is no better metaphor for Florentino’s self-martyring behavior than when he devours the flowers that remind him of Fermina only to become violently ill.
‘There is no greater glory than to die for love,’ thinks Florentino, but what is love to him. He posits love making as the ultimate act of love, yet despite a lifetime of constant sex with other women, still tells Fermina he is a virgin. On the surface, this is a lie he tells her to impress her, but to him this is his truth: the acts of sex meant nothing because only sex with her would count as love. This novel often seems to be read as one of great love, but I found it to be just the opposite, showing how vulgar much of our socially accepted impressions of love to be. His obsession is less endearing and more an act of control: he wants her for himself and when she was taken from him in their youth he feels he must reclaim the control he had. Even Fermina tells Florentino that they are strangers to one another. Much of Florentino’s love for Fermina is less love of her and love of his idea of her.
Over time, each character seems to reveal themselves as corrupt. Florentino is a charming character to read about, but he is quite despicable. There is certainly a [b:Lolita|7604|Lolita|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1377756377l/7604._SY75_.jpg|1268631]-like element to this book in that way. He is a womanizer (Marquez makes some sweeping generalizations about women and their “ways” here that are…not great) and even leads some of them to their death. With one, he writes that she belongs to him on her body, which causes the woman’s husband to slit her throat. But most despicable is the grooming of América Vicuña, a 14 year old girl he forces into a marriage with when he is 70. The metaphor is certainly there, the idea of his ravaging and destruction of her (aptly named America) fitting into the theme of cholera, a disease coming from Europe, ravaging the Americas as well as all the other elements of European colonialism over the Americas that embed themselves into the book, but maybe the rape and grooming of a 14 year old girl doesn’t need to be the way we blithely go about this in books? It’s a “yes I get it” but also can still be problematic. It is revealing of Florentino, however, as he is more relieved that he is not implicated in her death than he is grieving for her loss.
However, Marquez is masterful with complex characters and this book is quite the adventure in character development. While it is easy as a bystander to condemn Florentino for many of his actions and question if he truly loves Fermina, there is a lot of internal conflict going on that unveils his motives. Early on he is sexually assaulted by a woman and he is unable to determine which woman it was. There is a bit of a sense to the "hurt people hurt other people" idea, which doesn't condone him but does give an idea into how his behavior is a reaction to that coupled with the loss of Fermina.
I find Fermina to be the more interesting characters here as well. Her life is tragic and often dictated by the whims of men (such as her father, who forces her to break off contact with Florentino) but is also regarded much like an object by them. However, and possibly as a reaction to it, she can be very headstrong. She refuses to forgive her husband until he submits to her wishes, and is against the feeling of guilt, something likely due to how impressionable she was as a child and not wanting to feel vulnerable.
I find it amusing, too, that what she enjoys in Florentino at the end is the ways in which he reminds her of her former husband and that ‘the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability,’ enjoying the consistent moments instead of the sweeping joy that Florentino seems focused on. She is the realist whereas Florentino seems the idealist, who, in his grand quest for great love and martyring himself for its cause, commits despicable acts and glosses over them. In fact, much of her realization in adulthood had been that Florentino's charm had been an idealization of him and his promises. The love of the idea of him, which, as we see, goes both ways. It isn't until late in life they can remove all of this and be at peace with their feelings for each other. For Florentino, it was fulfillment for his years of struggles and the climax to his 622 relations, for Fermina it is companionship in the waning years of life.
Overall, this is a fine book with a lot of great writing and wonderful character development, but it never quite hit me the way his other works have. But wow can Marquez write. I suppose much of it is that tales of obsessive love strike me as more problematic than they would have when I was younger, though I did enjoy the way Marquez makes this almost a subversive reading of that. Yet he also dives into their characters to make this much more than simply a story about love but about why we feel, act, and most importantly, react, to the life around us. This was certainly an interesting book to read as we are also living in the times of Covid, a joke made in reference to this book so often that my book club finally decided to read it. An intense and interesting character study, Marquez once again shows why he is a household name of literature.
3.5/5
‘They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.’
For fifty-one years, nine months and four days, Florentino Ariza pines for Fermina Daza in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, a sweeping epic of love, plagues, and an awareness we are all marching towards death. Though known for his expertise in magical realism, here Marquez opts for a more direct approach in realism, chronicling the many years of unrequited love and allowing the magic of everyday reality to be its own fantastical journey through life. This is easily achieved by Marquez, a writer with prose of such intense beauty and a gift for commanding complex plots in an engaging manner. The book is dense, but in the way a diamond is dense, the prose compounding insights and observations through each perfectly written sentence (though it can be a bit of a slog at times). What results is that, in a book about both love and illness, we find love to appear as illness itself, with Florentino seeming to take pleasure in his own suffering. Marquez creates a very Humbert Humbert-esque character from him, with his reprehensible actions not condemned through the narration and allowing for a dynamic look at obsession in love as well as the impetus behind perseverance.
Something I enjoy with Marquez is how surprising his books can be. The novel begins with Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who we quickly learn dies, though much of the beginning of this book surrounds his relationship with his wife, Fermina. It’s the subversion of expectations of narrative that make this book quite fun, although it is lacking in the overt humor that we find in most of his works. Though with the Doctor we are thrust into a major theme of the book: the inevitability of death.
'At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of death.'
We see the doctor finding his body and mind becoming strangers to one another and throughout the novel, one dealing with cholera, we are constantly aware everyone has an expiration date.
‘She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.’
This is key for Florentino, as he suffers in love for Fermina as he ages. The ending, which is beautiful, becomes both a revisit of young love as well as a reversal, with the act of lovemaking focusing on their aging bodies as they attempt to sail off into a reclamation of eternal youth. It is as if in his self-imposed suffering he finds himself most alive, and—such as when he is jailed for serenading Fermina—reveling in his impression of himself as a martyr. Marquez excels at symbolism and imagery, with flowers being the most profound of them in this novel, and there is no better metaphor for Florentino’s self-martyring behavior than when he devours the flowers that remind him of Fermina only to become violently ill.
‘There is no greater glory than to die for love,’ thinks Florentino, but what is love to him. He posits love making as the ultimate act of love, yet despite a lifetime of constant sex with other women, still tells Fermina he is a virgin. On the surface, this is a lie he tells her to impress her, but to him this is his truth: the acts of sex meant nothing because only sex with her would count as love. This novel often seems to be read as one of great love, but I found it to be just the opposite, showing how vulgar much of our socially accepted impressions of love to be. His obsession is less endearing and more an act of control: he wants her for himself and when she was taken from him in their youth he feels he must reclaim the control he had. Even Fermina tells Florentino that they are strangers to one another. Much of Florentino’s love for Fermina is less love of her and love of his idea of her.
Over time, each character seems to reveal themselves as corrupt. Florentino is a charming character to read about, but he is quite despicable. There is certainly a [b:Lolita|7604|Lolita|Vladimir Nabokov|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1377756377l/7604._SY75_.jpg|1268631]-like element to this book in that way. He is a womanizer (Marquez makes some sweeping generalizations about women and their “ways” here that are…not great) and even leads some of them to their death. With one, he writes that she belongs to him on her body, which causes the woman’s husband to slit her throat. But most despicable is the grooming of América Vicuña, a 14 year old girl he forces into a marriage with when he is 70. The metaphor is certainly there, the idea of his ravaging and destruction of her (aptly named America) fitting into the theme of cholera, a disease coming from Europe, ravaging the Americas as well as all the other elements of European colonialism over the Americas that embed themselves into the book, but maybe the rape and grooming of a 14 year old girl doesn’t need to be the way we blithely go about this in books? It’s a “yes I get it” but also can still be problematic. It is revealing of Florentino, however, as he is more relieved that he is not implicated in her death than he is grieving for her loss.
However, Marquez is masterful with complex characters and this book is quite the adventure in character development. While it is easy as a bystander to condemn Florentino for many of his actions and question if he truly loves Fermina, there is a lot of internal conflict going on that unveils his motives. Early on he is sexually assaulted by a woman and he is unable to determine which woman it was. There is a bit of a sense to the "hurt people hurt other people" idea, which doesn't condone him but does give an idea into how his behavior is a reaction to that coupled with the loss of Fermina.
I find Fermina to be the more interesting characters here as well. Her life is tragic and often dictated by the whims of men (such as her father, who forces her to break off contact with Florentino) but is also regarded much like an object by them. However, and possibly as a reaction to it, she can be very headstrong. She refuses to forgive her husband until he submits to her wishes, and is against the feeling of guilt, something likely due to how impressionable she was as a child and not wanting to feel vulnerable.
I find it amusing, too, that what she enjoys in Florentino at the end is the ways in which he reminds her of her former husband and that ‘the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability,’ enjoying the consistent moments instead of the sweeping joy that Florentino seems focused on. She is the realist whereas Florentino seems the idealist, who, in his grand quest for great love and martyring himself for its cause, commits despicable acts and glosses over them. In fact, much of her realization in adulthood had been that Florentino's charm had been an idealization of him and his promises. The love of the idea of him, which, as we see, goes both ways. It isn't until late in life they can remove all of this and be at peace with their feelings for each other. For Florentino, it was fulfillment for his years of struggles and the climax to his 622 relations, for Fermina it is companionship in the waning years of life.
Overall, this is a fine book with a lot of great writing and wonderful character development, but it never quite hit me the way his other works have. But wow can Marquez write. I suppose much of it is that tales of obsessive love strike me as more problematic than they would have when I was younger, though I did enjoy the way Marquez makes this almost a subversive reading of that. Yet he also dives into their characters to make this much more than simply a story about love but about why we feel, act, and most importantly, react, to the life around us. This was certainly an interesting book to read as we are also living in the times of Covid, a joke made in reference to this book so often that my book club finally decided to read it. An intense and interesting character study, Marquez once again shows why he is a household name of literature.
3.5/5
‘They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.’
michaelpdonley's review against another edition
2.0
Florentino Ariza is a man who spends over a half century relentlessly pursuing a woman he's never spoken to. He saves his heart for Fermina Dasa, but recklessly pursues and conquers hundreds of lovers until he can have his "real" love. And supposedly these 600+ women find this loser irresistible. The fact that sometimes his lovers are young teens, faceless maids and old widows is portrayed as romantic and tender. Gag me.