Love in the Time of Cholera

No user reviews yet. Soon you will be able to review this book.

Check back in the near future to submit a review of this book.

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fanciful and lush novel is a romantic epic about love in its many guises, the clash of romanticism and rationalism, and the terrible agony of love sickness. At the apex of the novel's love triangle is Fermina Daza, who rejects her young lover Florentino Ariza, and marries the practical doctor Juvenal Urbino. While she lives a respectable and moral married life, Arize's passion for her is undiminished--despite his conquest of 622 other women. After 53 years, Urbino dies, and their love and life together begins again. The novel was adapted into a film in 2007 starring Javier Bardem as the love-smitten Ariza.
• "The greatest luxury, as in all of Garcia Marquez's books, is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality...the agelessness of the human story as told by one of this century's most evocative writers."
• "This is one of my favorite novels. It's so dense that no matter how many times I dip into it, I manage to find something startling that I have totally forgotten."
• "It's spellbinding--a luminous novel by a master of storytelling."
• I think a lot of the online reviewers of this book don't realize that this book is not about the relationship of Fermina and Florentino. The book is about love in all of its forms, and the characters in the book exist as vehicles to examine the strangest and most powerful of all human emotions. Love in the Time of Cholera is about: unrequited love (Florentino for Fermina); marital love (Fermina and Juvenal); platonic love (Florentino and Leona); angry love (Florentino and the poet who makes him so furious); jealous love (the adulterous wife killed because of her affair with Florentino); young love (Florentino and Fermina in the beginning); dangerous love (the mental patient and Florentino); adulterous love (Juvenal and his affair, Florentino and many of his women); love from afar (Florentino and Fermina); elderly love (Florentino and Fermina, Fermina and Juvenal; the cyanide suicide); May-December love (Florentino and his ward); the relationship between sex, age, society, art, death and love (pretty much the whole book).
  more...
  I could go on, but you get the idea. Any attempt to read this book as the story of Florentino and Fermina misses the point. The book is still very enjoyable that way, but look beyond the surface and enjoy Marquez' ruminations on that thing called love that drives us all crazy. Incidentally, I think it's one of the best books ever written.Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years
  less...