Gabriel García Márquez. Love in the Time of Cholera. Vintage Reprint, 2014.
Recommended by a dear Cuban friend, I dove into this book knowing that it would be a heavy read. Published in 1985 in Spanish, it was published in English in 1988. Set in northern Columbia from 1875 to 1925, it is a 50-year story of unrequited love. From Amazon:
From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds two people’s lives together for more than half a century.
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career, he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he does so again.
With humorous sagacity and consummate craft, Gabriel García Márquez traces an exceptional half-century of unrequited love. Though it seems never to be conveniently contained, love flows through the novel in many wonderful guises—joyful, melancholy, enriching, and ever surprising.
This is a complex and masterful literary work. I know many people do like it, primarily because the antagonist is not a good person. Even taking into account a culture of frequently arranged marriages and a different view of romantic love, Florentino is a narcissist who struggles to find really love, but he doesn’t know what it is.
This is not an easy book to read: the style is verbose and flowery, but quite evocative. I enjoyed the literary element immensely, and the protagonist is fascinating in his dysfunction and unrequited but relentless love. He caused a lot of damage over the years, even resulting in the deaths of some of his lovers, and yet it kept drawing me along, wondering if he would learn and grow or just continue a terribly unsatisfying but basically hedonistic life.
If you enjoy such complex literature and treatments of the human condition (which do not always make the reader feel good, sometimes they are more of a warning), then you may enjoy this. It will take some patience, but in my experience, well worth it.
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