Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

- January 03, 2022

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza have a brief, intense romance in their youth.

Fermina ultimately sees it as an impulsive dalliance with no future and breaks it off, later marrying an influential doctor.

Florentino never gets over it and spends decades filling his time with affairs while obsessing over Fermina.

It’s hard to see how Florentino’s feelings for Fermina could have been more than an obsessive infatuation since he never really knew her.

At best, he was in love with the girl who she was without considering the woman she became.

However, what do we make of the fact that they do finally fall in love at the end of their lives?

Maybe there was a kind of recognition and respect for each other’s long histories of experience that finally brought them together.

Maybe the fact that their lives had always touched to some extent leant their eventual love a sense of fate and inevitability.

This is a beautifully written and translated book.

The evocation of Columbia at the turn of the 19th century is one of the best things about it.

I often found myself disliking Florentino, who is absolutely monstrous at some points.

In his 60s, he grooms a 14-year-old girl for a sexual relationship.

It is related in rosy, playful language that made me want to gag, but then Garcia Marquez seems to signal his recognition of Florentino’s debasement by referring to his bedroom as his “secret slaughterhouse.”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I’m not sure what to make of this.

Perhaps it’s an acknowledgement of the depths to which a man can sink when his sensibilities have been twisted to the point where he can mistake a life-long obsession for a great romance.