Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera

It’s easy to forgive Oprah for the James Frey debacle when her book club includes novels like East of Eden, The Poisonwood Bible, and Love in the Time of Cholera. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s languid novel of enduring love in a time and place far from our own stirs romantic dreams of a determined, unrequited love at long last requited. Marquez evokes the hopeless idealist’s dream, and the novel mines the feverished imaginings of ill-timed romances everywhere for the idea that though the door may have seemed closed, for some it is not, and never was.

Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza conduct a love affair of letters and telegrams in their youth, but she ends up marrying a rich, handsome doctor. Florentino proceeds to save his love for Fermina, conducting hundreds of casual affairs until her husband dies in their old age, when he presents himself and re-declares his undying love and devotion to her.

Marquez’s prose follows a different rhythm, off-handedly bringing the antiquated world of riverboats, swamps, and cholera in Mexico to life, while tenderly documenting the changing perspectives and lives of Florentino and Fermina during their sixty years apart. Despite their separation, the novel is a cheerful one, matter-of-fact about the impact of love as an actual disease not unlike cholera, and it leaves a lasting impression on the reader.