n  “I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.”n

I had finished this one almost two days now, but can’t think of what to write immediately, for I love to dwell in a greyscale world, whereas this novel lives on the abundant shades of tangerine and often, gold. The last time I started this novel, however, I had left it after around 70 pages, for I could guess every single thing that was going to happen.

n   “The only regret I will have in dying is if it is not for love.”n

Well, if the same story was told by anyone else, I seriously doubt if it could have been a quarter as good at least. For it takes something quite extraordinary to make such outstanding storytelling out of such an absurd base. Moreover, it manages to blur the fine line of difference between love and obsession (much like Martin Scorsese did a few years back in his The Wolf of Wall Street, irrelevant as it may seem), without glorifying the negative aspects and the outcomes of such an obsessive lust. At the same time, it talks about diverse ventures and social prejudices which a man goes through and relives every other day to explore his sexuality. And Márquez does manage to leave it upon you if the scandals that may be caused by multiple issues of adultery and paedophilia are justified or not. It’s all on you to decide.

n   “ “I mean,” he said, “that these letters are something very different.”
“Everything in the world has changed,” she said.
“I have not,” he said. “Have you?”
She sat with her second cup of tea halfway to her mouth and rebuked him with eyes that had survived so many inclemencies.
“By now it does not matter,” she said. “I have just turned seventy-two.””n

If you’ve read Márquez’s autobiography, however, you will know very well each event before it is to happen. Not that it will in any way mar your experience, for this isn’t a story that you will read to know what will happen in the end. The romance between his parents was, very warm and affectionate despite being a bit harrowing, but probably nothing out of the ordinary. And nothing similar to the one between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza apart from the identical chain of events, too. But I will still suggest that you read all of his works before reading his autobiography.

The recurring themes of ardour, libido and frankly, maniacal infatuation delineated is however a cover-up for the signature theme of Márquez, of solitude and existential crisis. Though quite addictively labyrinthine, the narration is way more accessible too than his other works. Like, it’s something that is a bit hard to get into, but if you manage that part, you can’t abandon a word. However, it’s quite a detour from his other novels with the profound application of magical realism or stream of consciousness; but the final product is just as resplendent and enchanting as any of them. Ranks a bit lower in terms of ingenuity, though, for unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude this one wasn’t constructed ex nihilo. Discernible similarities with Márquez’s other works though, weirdly I found too many traces of No One Writes to The Colonel.

However, the symbolisms were impressive, even after being kept as simple as possible. Florentino Ariza was looked down upon for being a ‘hijo de la calle’ (son of the street, he was as good as abandoned by his biological father) and his ‘rival’ had the name: Juvenal Urbino de la Calle… and this wasn’t at all perceptible in the translation, sadly.

What I found the most amazing was that it never gets tiresomely reiterated, though it does stand over the edge many times. Six hundred and twenty-two love affairs, man. Like, how on earth could he conjure so many ‘liaisons’ where each one is unique in its own way? And what makes it different from all the other love stories is that it elucidates the love of a pair of septuagenarians, i.e. a gloomy cloud of death looms over all the ‘happy parts’. And it’s also the age that makes quite some people dislike this novel. Like Ofelia said: “Love is ridiculous at our age,… but at theirs it is revolting.”

Maybe it is, but I’m biased. I found the story just as flawless and magnificent as I expected it to be, and this second time just as grand an experience as I could have hoped for.

n   '“We men are the miserable slaves of prejudice,” he had once said to her. “But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”'n

‘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.

'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 Lolita-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.’

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera: "it was inevitable: The smell of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

I saved my favorite opening phrase for my last. When we realize that cyanide smells like bitter almonds, this phrase opens like a lotus flower revealing an amazing amount of depth, sensuality, and irony. The entire book is going to be about unrequited love as we as told here. The reader's curiosity is also piqued by the questioning of where the smell of cyanide could be coming from. I have always found that this apparently simple phrase was plump with meaning and perfectly suited to the book it introduces - perhaps the most perfect opening line I have ever found.

بالرغم من النحس المبالغ فيه المصاحب لمحاولاتي لإنهاء الرواية ، إلا إنها رااااااااااائعة ومذهلة ، عمري في حياتي ما اتسرقت في الحكاية قد ما اتسرقت في الرواية دي ، دخل بيا من حدوتة لحدوتة ، أحداث قديمة في أحداث جديدة ، رغم إن فيرمينا داثا هي في رأيي بطلة الرواية إلا إنه ما حكاش عنها قد ما حكى عن عشيقها المجنون فعلياً بيها ، حبيت أوي الدكتور أوربينو ، وعجبتني جداً فيرمينا ، ماحبيتش فليورينتو آريثا إلا لما فيرمينيا بدأت تتقبله في آخر الرواية
مشكلته مش انه حبها لدرجة الجنون ، مشكلته ان حياته كانت من غير هدف ، ولما قابلها خلاها هدف حياته اللي عايش عشانه ، احتقرت جداً اللي عمله مع امريكا فيونكا .
عميقة أووووي الرواية ، علمتني كتير.. متهيألي إني ما قرأتهاش .. أنا عشت فيها