This book contains the most single lines in one work that I wish to lift from their pages and paste around my house so that I may bask in their glory on a daily basis.

Reading other reviews of this text always puzzles me. No, I don't need everyone to love what I love to the extent that I love it, but it just seems that those who detest it have really suffered a failure at literacy. With the risk of further offense, I will state that I believe the culprit is that cute little "Oprah's Book Club." This is not a work on which you stick a celebrity (if that's what she is) seal of approval and then throw in a gym bag or beach bag and sneak some pages in here and there because some famous lady told you that you should. It's serious literature.

And yet hilarious. Marquez shines as a comic genius of irony (the significance of cholera to this book is, itself, genius storytelling) and critical examiner of human relationships. An exploration on love-- love in all forms-- is conducted as thoroughly as if it were a science project. Perhaps this is where Marquez loses the aforementioned displeased readers, who wish to bottle love in a neat definition or notion that closely reflects the love they are experiencing in their own lives. The world is much broader than our silly little individual plights, my friends, and the experience of love changes if you are to ask an old woman, young man, or adolescent girl to define it. Marquez captures each of their stories, and more, and never asks that his reader compare these to their own experience of love, he simply describes them and includes them in Love's definition.

I find the courtship between Fermina and Florentino dazzling and spot-on. Yes, it is obsessive and incredibly fickle, but that is MY experience of adolescent love! I find new love between octogenarians inspiring and heartwarming, because after an entire lifetime, what two other individuals better know themselves and, thus, are able to give themselves entirely to each other? I also wasn't offended (as many are) by Florentino's relationship with the under-age America. Again, Marquez is being exploratory, and he gives no love or relationship safe haven from his literary microscope. He doesn't purport to create "perfect" and "ideal" characters, and how many of us can truly say we "like" our own mates ALL of the time anyway? This isn't "The Notebook," and some of the depicted relationships might come across as unsavory and vile to some of our self-righteous American eyes, but isn't such narrow-mindedness a bad mate for *real* literature anyway?

"Love in the Time of Cholera" is fine literature. Superbly written, beautiful and rich, I see this as nothing short of a masterpiece.

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”



Because I'd heard that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was so different from One Hundred Years of Solitude (one of my favorite novels), it took me a while to actually read it. Love in the Time of Cholera is very different from .One Hundred Years, but it is a wonderful character-driven story that spans the entire life and loves of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. They had been passionately in love in their youth, but Fermina eventually rejects Florentino for a wealthy doctor. Florentino's life is spent in expectation of one day reuniting with his love (amid a reported 622 affairs)! Fantastic ending! 4.25 stars.

“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.”

Trigger Warnings: stalking, rape (never graphic, but always glorified), pedophilia, racism, manipulation, misogyny, suicide, grooming, obsessive “love.” (I’m gonna discuss all of these in the review so be warned.)

Love in the Time of Cholera is, beyond a doubt, the most terrifying book I’ve ever read. It is nothing but 350 pages of stalking, rape glorification, pedophilia, racism, manipulation, and misogyny buried under a mountain of beautiful prose. Yes, the writing is beautiful. It’s so beautiful that even I, for a few separate moments, would get sucked into this disgusting story by the gorgeous and evocative writing. That’s exactly this book’s danger. It’s so beautifully written that you forget how creepy and terrifying it is. Interspersed with the rape and obsession, we’ll have a line like this:

“In reality, they were distracted letters, intended to keep the coals alive without putting her hand in the fire, while Florentino Ariza burned himself alive in every line.” (pg. 69)

That’s beautiful. It’s great writing, a real show of Marquez’s mastery of language (and shoutout to the translator, Edith Grossman, too). But it’s also a prime example of what’s wrong with this book: Fermina Daza does not love Florentino Ariza. She did love him. When she was fifteen. And then she went on what was essentially an extended forced vacation and fell out of love with him. It says so right up there in that line. But Florentino Ariza refuses to accept that. He doesn’t accept it when she breaks off their engagement. He doesn’t accept it when she marries someone else. He doesn’t accept it when he shows up at Fermina’s husband’s funeral and declares his love for her (yes, at her husband’s funeral) and she tells him to fuck off.

“Fermina Daza could not have imagined that her letter, inspired by blind rage, would have been interpreted by Florentino Ariza as a love letter.” (pg. 279)

Florentino Ariza is the ultimate Nice Guy™, clearly a strong believer in the Friendzone, except he’s fifty times scarier, because in addition to being a manipulator, a rapist, a pedophile, and a raging misogynist, he’s also really fucking charming. He writes love letters for other people, because he’s so good with words. He’s the type of guy you refuse and he’ll stand on your doorstep shouting love poems through your doorway until three hours later you let him in just so he’ll shut up. And that’s basically exactly what happens in this book, except instead of shouting his love poems, he writes them to her, and instead of three hours, it’s fifty-one years, nine months, and four days. Can you imagine being pursued by the same Nice Guy™ for fifty-one years, nine months, and four days? No wonder Fermina Daza gives in in the end. She’s seventy-two years old. She just wants some peace and quiet, but this ridiculous man won’t let her have it, because when they were teenagers, he decided that she was his and his alone and now that her husband has died, Florentino Ariza won’t fucking go away. He literally shows up at her house every day, grooming her during her mourning period so that when she’s recovered, she’ll have someone she trusts nearby to fall in love with again. It’s every Meninist’s wet dream.

Therein lies the danger of this book. The message, the overarching thing that Marquez apparently wants you to take away from reading his novel, is that when a woman says “no,” what she really means is “make me change my mind.” It says exactly that on pg. 188.

“He believed that when a woman says no, she is waiting to be urged before making her final decision.”

And that doesn’t even go into the bizarrely misogynist anecdotes that line every page of this book, either, like when a houseful of sex workers literally throw themselves at Florentino’s teenage feet, begging him to have sex with them, not for money, but for the pure gratification of experiencing his amazing dick (pg. 63-64). This is an actual thing that happens in this book. (It’s actually a recurring theme in this book that all women, especially Black and Indigenous women, except Fermina Daza are sex addicts. She’s the pure, pale-skinned virgin, Not Like Other Women, who are all impure and dirty. Not that that stops Florentino Ariza from sleeping with 622 of them. Yup, that’s a thing. And those are only the ones he knows the names of.)

More gross stuff:
--Young Florentino also likes to spend time at a lighthouse looking through a hole in a wall at the women-only side of the beach and then is disappointed when they don’t take more of their clothes off. (pg. 94)
--Male and female rape are both excused, throughout the narrative. Florentino loses his virginity when a woman on a ship rapes him. He then spends the rest of his time on the boat trying to find her again to have more sex, being not-at-all negatively affected by his experience. (pg. 142)
--It’s a common theme that rape is not traumatic at all, either for men or women, but is simply someone’s sexual awakening. It goes so far beyond rape apology, it actually glorifies it. Amazing.
--Example: Florentino’s friend (and the only woman in the book besides his mother and a nun whom he doesn’t have an affair with) was violently raped as a young woman by a complete stranger on the street. “Lying there on the rocks, her body covered with cuts and bruises, she had wanted that man to stay forever so that she could die of love in his arms.” (pg. 258)
--Pages 193-195 are a racist anti-Chinese interlude that has literally nothing to do with the plot or rest of the book whatsoever. It’s just there, for no apparent reason other than to be racist.
--Fermina’s husband has an affair. Fermina isn’t upset that he had an affair, she’s upset that his mistress is a Black woman. She insists that she should have known, because Black women have a particular smell. (pg. 250)

But the kicker, the real kicker of the novel, where everything has already progressed beyond hope and you think this book could not possibly get any worse, comes in almost at the end. Florentino Ariza, at the age of seventy-four becomes the guardian of a fourteen-year-old girl whom he then has a sexual affair with. This is treated as completely acceptable.

“She was still a child in every sense of the word… but he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year… he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse.” (pg. 272)

He sits her on a table and braids her hair for her and ties her shoes, because she’s not very good at it yet. He buys her stuffed animals as presents. She’s that young. And he doesn’t worry about anyone suspecting their affair, because “the extreme difference in their ages placed them beyond all suspicion.” (pg. 273) And then, when Florentino breaks things off with her to go stalk Fermina some more, the girl kills herself out of grief. And Florentino just goes right back to Fermina, like it never even happened.

But the scariest thing about Love in the Time Cholera? How many people love it. The sheer number of people who look past all that disgusting, inexcusable bullshit and just see a well-written book about a time-tested love. That is truly the most terrifying thing of all.

n  Remember me with a rose.n

That pressed flower kept long ago in a favorite book did not appear conceited of its appearance. There was no sheen, no fragrance, no guard of pricking thorns and yet it carried a delightful reminder of a time when the first wary step towards love awakened feverish fantasies about a world where poets find their rhymes, writers find their stories and romantics find the gleeful manifestation of an incurable disease. So when I read about a 'Love' which bloomed and survived in the time of Cholera, I knew that such flowers will also remind me of the singular passion of Florentino Ariza.

In a distant land with no personal ties, in a former century with no wistful years; an inadvertent disquiet loomed over my heart when death greeted me on the very first page. It carried the bittersweet smell of a diffident age fused with ambiguous existence and gradually traced back to a glorious existence laden with years of steady intimacy. The married life of Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino had that comforting balance of enough life and enough marriage. The time that was granted to them had its share of trivial to grievous fights, urgent to obliged sex, indifference to compassion for the people around them and dealing with everyday reality in the hope to ascend the ladder of love- step by misstep by step. And not very far away from them, Florentino Ariza’s long wait was waiting for its end while his virgin heart diligently registered the beats which were solely preserved for Fermina.

He was convinced in the solitude of his soul that he had loved in silence for a much longer time than anyone else in this world ever had.

But Magical Realism is a beguiling genre. It has numerous tricks up its sleeve and is always on a lookout for an opportunity to convert magic into real, illusion into fact and impossible into possible. There’s an underlying tease present in Marquez’s exquisite writing and he effortlessly moves from caricatural to profound portrayal of emotions. The trials and tragedy dictating the actions of lovers wear the mask of beauty as well as depravity and the fact the Ariza is not a conventional Hero but a mere protagonist of this novel becomes evident in a rather revolting way. Between unrequited love and longing to hold Fermina’s hands, Ariza mapped the errant streets of carnal pleasures and on his way convinced himself of many things that are fair in the name of love but his claims and clamors must be taken with a pinch of salt. Whether it’s the matter of 622 affairs, his transitory bonds born out of pity or his vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love, one needs to move beyond the face value of things to decide the worth of magic in reality.

Marquez quietly let his presence felt with words like this: It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death and slowly withdraws to give a reader charge of the unsaid thoughts. Amidst a vast river of themes, it’s hard to comprehend everything in its entirety but what one can readily believe in is the spectacle that marked the beginning of a new voyage in the end when occasional realization about passing of time made two wrinkled hands entwined into an unbreakable grasp to sail away to a shore beyond love in the time of cholera.

The music stopped after midnight, the voices of the passengers dispersed and broke into sleepy whispers, and two hearts, alone in the shadows on the deck, were beating in time to the breathing of the ship.

“Too much love is as bad for this as no love at all.”

-------Florentino Ariza, Love in the Time of Cholera.


How right. For, this book is about everything but love. Or is it? Could it be about chasing the notion of love? The notion which becomes as chronic as the Cholera itself and which leaves its patient a midst a ceaseless mourning?

It seems so to be the case with Florentino Ariza, who, for more than half a century, attires himself as one in mourning of a rejected love while still trying to fight the disease in his own manner, invoking in as much as 622 remedies till he attains the one which can cure him of his illness. And that is when he renounces mourning.

What really strikes the reader while reading the work is that while this book is all about love (notion of love?), there isn’t even a single harmonious love relation between any of the characters portrayed. That brings to mind the question that whether one can term the 622 relations of Florentino as love ones. I am inclined to think otherwise. For how a human can possibly remain at peace with so many love (sexual?) relations when it takes a whole life time to come to terms with even one, as is the case with Fermina Daza. What kind of love would provoke a man aged 70 years to incite the passions of a 14 year old girl and then leave her to agonize and die with same disease which he is now hopeful of finding the cure of for himself? Is it love or another facet of bare human passions which get accelerated at the fear of impending decay?

One may argue that it is love which Fermina and Florentino discover aboard New Fidelity. But in my view it is partially true. For Florentino, it is the cure of his illness in the form of realization of a long held desire, whereas for Fermina, it is the fulfillment of a need of desired companionship whose necessity becomes inevitable in the old age.

Five stars for the work because of Gabriel’s skillfulness in bringing to mind some distressing thoughts in a very subtle manner. He is so dexterous here in the demonstration of human passions in all its nakedness that one cannot help but sail along in whichever direction the narrative takes. His direct and simple expression makes one visualize the work with a reserved abidance as one marvel at his distinct aloofness in the portrayal of his characters: their emotions and passions. His restrain helps the reader to remain unruffled while trying to find the answers for the questions his work invokes.

5 "masculine, organic, decaying...." stars !

8th Favorite Read of 2016

Do not make the mistake that this book is about love.

This book is about much more common vices.

Vices that masquerade for love.

Jealousy, obsession, desire, pity and vengeance.

Perpetually selfish penises promising but only perjuring voluminous misunderstood vaginas.

Men using women that use men.

The demise of the body, civilization, disease, poverty, stolen riches, subservience, slavery.

Sexual abuse in the guise of parental guidance.

Smothering overindulgent mothers psychologically killing sons and maiming daughters.

Beauty and comfort for the very few. Shades of skin as important as class and wealth.

Narcissism, poetry and empty years of mindless despair.

Rot, sickeningly sweet perfumes, theft and unknown history.

Oh no, do not misunderstand -this book is not about love. Anything but.

I did not enjoy this at all. This is a book about a weak man excessively obsessed with a married woman for over 50 years. He pines his time away with 622 sexual encounters that he records and we have to read through. The book is SLOW! He is sickly obsessed. He's a pervert, possibly a pedophile. He finally is reunited with his true love when she is in her 80's and then he describes their bodies and love life. Don't recommend this to anyone! This is not what true love is...it is a book about obsession and weakness. Wasted my time when there are so many wonderful books out there to read!

كلما لفتني الحيرةُ أكثرَ بعد إنتهائي من شيء ما، أدركتُ بشكل أكبر مدى تعلقي به ومدى الأثر الذي سيحفِرهُ داخلي، مستقبلًا بلا شك، واليوم، وبعدَ إنتهائي من قراءة هذه الرواية، عصفت بي جميع أشكال الحيرة الممكنة، فكان كل ما يشغل ذهني هو: ما التالي؟
من سأشارك بما قرأت؟
ولمن سأبوح بما أحسست؟
فالشمس طالعة والفجر قد مرَّ منذُ ساعات، وما من أحد هنا غيري...

(حبٌ عظيم, حبٌ قوي, حبٌ جبار)
وكل ما يمكن أن يخطر على بالٍ من مرادفاتٍ لهذه الصفات أعلاه.
حب سيغير مفهومك عن الحب.
حب سيبدل ما تعرفه عن الكبرياء، عن الأصرار وعن الأمل.
حب سيعيد تعريف معنى الصبر ومعنى الوفاء.
حب ستفقد معه الحد الفاصل بين ما هو معقول ومقبول، وما هو ضرب من ضروب الجنون.

بحثتُ أكثرَ عن الرواية، وعنما إذا كانَ قد تمَّ تبنيها بشكل متقنٍ بما يكفي لأعيش قليلًا منْ ما عايشته أثناءَ قراتي للسطور، وعلمتُ أنَّ الكاتبَ رفضَ أيَّ عملٍ مماثلٍ طوالَ فترةِ حياتهِ، كيلا يتمَ تقييدُ شخصياتِ الرواية، وقولبتهم داخل إطارٍ شكلي محدد في عقول المشاهدين، مانحًا الفرصة، كلَّ الفرصة، لأُخيلة القارئ، وهي وجهة نظر لا تستحق سوى كلِ الاحترامِ لكاتبٍ لهُ كل الحقْ بطبيعةِ التصرفِ بما يكتُب...

قصةُ حبٍ عن شخصٍ عاشَ سنينهُ أبيضًا كشبحٍ وأسودًا كظل، لونان طالما لازماه طوال حياته، قاسى من الظلمِ الشيء الكثير، لكنَ قلبهُ لم يزل أقوى من كل من وقفوا بطريقه، ليحافظَ على عاطفتهِ الجياشة، شاعريتهِ المشهودة، ورؤيتهِ المغايرة لكل ما كان يجري حوله، يشعُ أملًا وحبًا، رغمَ أن أن مظهرهُ منافٍ لكلِ ما سبقَ ذكرهُ!
"شخص ذميمٌ وكئيب, إلّا أنه ينضحُ حبًا"

"هل يا ترى ستكون الأغنية التي أستمع لها أثناء كتابتي هذه السطور كافية؟"

أتمنى الآن، أكثرَ من أيِّ وقتٍ مضى، لو كنتُ أكثرَ من مجرد متدربٍ مبتدئ، لو أنني أتقن العزفَ ولو قليلًا، قليلًا بما يكفي ليتيح لي ترجمةَ هذا الفيض من المشاعر الذي تمكن مني الى لغة الموسيقى، وتحويله الى فالسٍ صغير، يحاكي كمان فلورنتينو، علّهُ يصل فيرمينا...

لم يكن لدينا بطلٌ واضحٌ للرواية، بالمعنى الكلاسيكي، خاصةً في بادئ الأمر، فالرحلةُ يقودها عدةْ أشخاص خلال عدةِ فتراتٍ من حياتهم, وحتى تلك الفترات لم تكن مصفوفة بشكل خطي، أنما مبعثرة، لنبدأَ حيثُ سنتلقي مجددًا قُربَ النهاية، ودومًا ما أحببتُ مثل هذه الألاعيبِ السردية، شريطة أن لا تسببَ الالتباسْ، وهي هنا لم تكُّ كذلك...
ورغمَ أنني أنهيتُ قراءةَ الروايةِ في أقلِ من خمسةِ أيامٍ، إلّا أنني أحسستُ بكل سنينِ الانتظار، الواحدةِ والخمسينَ بأشهرها التسعْ وأيامها الأربعْ♥️

في النهاية، لم يبقى لي حلٌ سوى كتابتي لهذه السطور، لأحاول تفريغَ بعضٍ مما أشعر به، وهذا هو هدفي الأساس من كتابة ما أكتبه هنا، أن أفرغ ما يحتاج التفريغ، وفي مكانه المناسب، حتى حين لم يكن أحدٌ يقرأ، ولأحتفظَ ب آرائي الأنية خامةً، كما هي فور إنهاء التجربة، خالية من تصحر الذاكرة، وبلا أي أثارٍ للتعرية التي تتم عادة بفعل مرورِ الوقتِ ليسَّ إلّا...
وعادةً تتم مثل هذه المصارحات بعد مرور أيام من أنتهائي من القراءة، باحثًا عن ساعة صفاء كفيلة بأستخلاصِ ما بداخلي من جهة، ولأترك العمل يُهضم بالكامل، وأترك أثره لينمو داخلي من جهة
أخرى، لكن هذه المرة الوضع مغاير، فأنا أن أكتب ما أكتبه الأن ليس إلّا لأتمكن من النوم، على الأقل...

أما ما كنتُ أنتظرهُ عند أختياري لهذه الرواية وكاتبها العظيم، في هذا الوقت، هما شيئانِ، لا ثالثَ لهما:
الشطحاتُ والكوليرا، ولمْ أجد كليهما، فصدق أو لا تصدق، الكوليرا ليست حاضرةً سوى بشكلٍ هامشي في أحدى الفترات غيرِ المُهمة، والتي تتناولُ قصةَ والد إحدى الشخصيات، وهي شخصيةٌ ليست حتى من ثنائي البطولة، المتورط بقصة الحبِ التي نحنُ بصددها!
ليكون الحبُ في زمن، والكوليرا في زمن!!
لكنَّ جودةَ التصوير، البراعة في رسمِ الشخصيات، القفزاتْ الزمنية وأختلافِ المنظور السردي، بالاضافة إلى جودة، ربما، كلِّ شيءٍ آخرْ، تساهمُ في تلاشي الافتقاد للجائحة، فليس هنالكَ متسعٌ لمثل هذه
التأملاتْ أثناءَ الرحلة، ربما بعدها، كما يحدثُ هنا، الآنْ...
إلّا أنَّ إفتقادي للشطحاتِ ضلَّ كالغصةِ طوالَ قرآتي للنصفِ الأول، الذي فقدتُ بأنتهائه، أيَّ أملٍ في تكرارِ ما كانَ يحدثُ في "مئةَ عامٍ من العزلة"
فكقارئٍ مبتدئ، كان لدي خيارينِ مهمينِ لم يبدُّ وقتها غيرهما، مع عملاقٍ من عمالقة الأدب العالمي، وقد أقتنيتُ الكتابين بلا أي تجربة، بثقةٍ بلهاءَ بمنْ مروا قبلي، ولأنَّ أكثرَ ما أعجبني في قرائتي الأولى له هو الخيال الذي لا مثيل لهُ، ورغم أن قرية "ماكوندو"
وقتها كانت متخمة بهِ، إلّا أنه ما كانَّ يزهرُ ويتألق إلّا من جذورٍ عميقةٍ في الأرض، لتنتشي وتفقدَ بعد مدةٍ قصيرة الأحساسَ بالخيطِ الفاصلِ بين الواقع والخيال، ويتواصلَ هذا الانتقال الرشيق حتى آخر السطور، بدون أن تشعر بالمبالغات التي تمرُ أمامكَ، لتصل معها الى حالة من الألفة، ولكون هذهِ السمة هيَ أكثر ما ميز تجربتي اليتيمةَ معَ الكاتب، وعليه كانَّ من الطبيعي أن تكون رحلتي الثانية معه ما هي إلّا بحثٌ عن مزيد، وهذا ما لم أجده، وربما لنْ أجدهُ مجددًا، ورغمَ أنها مقارنةٌ غير عادلة، إلّا انَّ المشاعر لا تحكم بالمنطق، والمنطق لم يمنع الإحباط من التسلسلِ إلى ثناياي، ولو كان في بادئ قرائتي

"... I will die of love because I love you,
Love, in fire and in blood."
Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets


Edvard Munch, "The Kiss"
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No matter the years, or her marriage, or the ravages of time.

"To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell."

Márquez composed this touching ode to Love, love in its purest essence, with his effortless, orchestral prose purposed to revere Love's many wondrous forms, reminisce its joys and probe the unbearable suffering at the loss of a Beloved with a Love Everlasting in the Heart.

The novel is, quite simply, n  an Elysian Symphony to the Strength and Stamina of Love, of a Man, for a Womann.

“The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”
Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Addendum Feb. 8, 2017
Until I picked up two of Marquez' short novels last week, I did not realize how perverted he appears to have been. In both Of Love and Other Demons and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, from what I read, the protagonists had sexual affairs with 12-year-old girls. I decided not to read any further, and I lowered my 5-star rating to 4 stars. I guess one could call these moral choices or statements.

Han sido tres los motivos por los que este libro no me ha gustado. Por una parte, las altísimas expectativas que tenía, no solo por la fama que precede a su autor sino porque ‘Cien años de soledad’ había dejado el listón bastante alto. Salvo en ciertos momentos, esa chispa de genialidad que sentí en su obra más conocida, aquí no la encontré. No hay duda de que Gabriel García Márquez escribe muy bien pero no consiguió atraparme y eché de menos también un mayor peso del realismo mágico en esta trama.
El segundo motivo, es que esta obra se vende como una gran historia de amor. Y yo no fui capaz de ver eso en ningún momento a pesar de que la premisa así lo sugiere. Yo con este libro asistí a una historia de obsesión, de capricho, de obcecamiento, pero ni rastro de esa gran historia de amor que todo el mundo proclama. Me pareció mucho más un caso de búsqueda del placer propio que de anteponer las necesidades y deseos del otro, que es lo que para mí sí podría ser amor.
Por último, el tercer motivo es que yo no estaba preparado para el decálogo de parafilias sexuales que contiene este libro y para la romantización que se lleva a cabo de ciertos comportamientos absolutamente deleznables. Soy consciente de que esas realidades existen, que la novela hace referencia a otra época y en ningún caso creo que la literatura deba ser moralizante… pero tampoco veo el sentido de romantizar la pedofilia o la violación hasta convertirlas en una experiencia aspiracional. Al menos, a mí no me agrada leerlo.

RESEÑA COMPLETA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYQ3T...

Ok. Sé que el autor es García Márquez, cuyo nombre es muy importante en la literatura latinoamericana y por qué no decirlo: mundial. PERO! Necesito dar mi opinión de lector absolutamente amateur e ignorante.
El libro se me hizo largo, muy largo. Mi regla dorada es nunca jamás dejar un libro sin leer y pienso seguir teniéndola, quizás por siempre. No pude enganchar con la historia hasta quizás las últimas 10-15 páginas, cuando de verdad le puse atención a esta "linda" historia de amor. Pero, pero, PERO!... Tengo mis reparos. Sé que el libro se basa en otros tiempos los cuales no son los de ahora, y así y todo no me puede gustar esa romantización de la obsesión disfrazada de amor. No me convence el hecho de flirtear una y otra y otra y otra y otra vez con la misma mujer. Entiendo cuando alguien se enamora de la persona equivocada (me ha pasado más de 1 vez), pero para todo hay un límite. Si Firmina no quiere a Florentino, no lo quiere no más, y punto. Pero ¿Por qué insistir tanto, y por tantos años? ¿Por qué no aceptar que no te quieren, o que quizás se conocieron en el momento equivocado? No sé, eso de romantizar una obsesión no va conmigo, y casi 500 páginas describiendo lo mismo cansa... o a mí me cansó por lo menos. Insisto, las últimas pocas páginas presté atención y por eso le pongo 2 estrellas en vez de una.
Los que no estén de acuerdo conmigo, lo respeto totalmente y pido disculpas a quienes se sienten ofendidos.

Amor (no obsesión) y paz para todos!

Θα ήταν αδύνατο να γραφτεί για δεύτερη φορά από τον ίδιο συγγραφέα κάτι που να πλησιάζει σε αξία το Εκατό χρόνια μοναξιά, το καταλαβαίνω.
Παρόλα αυτά περίμενα κάτι παραπάνω. Τεράστιες οι προσδοκίες από τον Μάρκεζ, άλλωστε.
Δεν θα αδικήσω το βιβλίο πάντως, είναι εξαιρετικό και το προτείνω στον καθένα. Απλώς όταν έχεις δοκιμάσει το καλύτερο φαγητό από τον καλύτερο σεφ στον κόσμο, ένα πολύ καλό γεύμα σε ένα πολύ καλό εστιατόριο μπορεί να σου φανεί άνοστο.