Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

There is no writer I know of who is more adept at capturing the depth and intricacies of a given human emotion than Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He never tires of exploring the depths of love and never ceases to be fascinating in so doing.

In 'Love in the Time of Cholera', Garcia Marquez tells the tale of Florentino Ariza and his boundless, but unfulfilled love for a childhood sweetheart named Fermina Daza. The longing and torment that Florentino experiences throughout over half a century of Fermina Daza's marriage is at times excruciating. However it is still lent a certain tragic and poignant beauty by the author.

The emotions and anguish that Florentino suffers are surely ones that are common to any human being. Equally anyone who has experienced these emotions, will know that their complexity and depth easily necessitate the 400+ pages that comprise this book. Also that it would take a writer like Gabriel Garcia Marquez to do them justice.

The conclusion of this novel is, ultimately, realistic. The conclusion of an unrequited love is rarely straightforward. There is usually not a clean, Hollywood-esque finish and the novel perfectly conveys this. Without being even the slightest bit populist, this novel is a beautifully thought out and beautifully rendered work, which will surely resonate with all of its readers.

Almost everything Florentino Ariza has done in his adult life has been for Fermina Daza, Ariza's young love who shunned him decades ago. Florentino Ariza's devotion has lasted through his rise up the occupational ladder, stagnant disapproval from Fermina Daza's father, several meaningless erotic affairs, Daza's marriage to the stern intellectual, Dr. Jubinal Urbino, and fifty years. This impressive, convincing and charming love story acts as a vehicle for Marquez's vivid descriptive powers. While reading this book one feels as if he or she is smelling the perfumed letters; breathing in the wet, moist mornings; tasting the fried fish and feeling the sticky air. Marquez effectively casts his spell and the reader is ensnared with with Florentino Ariza and his feelings of longing and misery.

Whether to enjoy this book or not would probably best be determined by how one reads it. If for entertainment, it is a clever story, with several twists and turns, and a fairly satisfactory ending, although there were some casualties on the way. If read as a treatise on love, one would most likely gain a fairly wide ranging insight into the different types if love in the novel-although I doubt my interpretation of love was actually there!
Personally, I tried to do a bit of both, but for the story to really be a winner it should have been kinder somehow. Maybe it's me being overly sentimental and sensitive about the betrayal and portrayal of women here, I don't know, but there just seem to be too many women who are lied to, cheated and hurt, and quite satisfied with their lot.
Is Florentino Ariza's love really love? Has he given up anything in his life for Fermina Daza? Not a thing, as far as I could see, everything that he experienced was internal. He lies to her ("I've remained a virgin for you") and misreperesents himself to her completely, taking victims in the process (America Vicuna and the woman murdered by her husband, her name escapes me).
To be honest, he quite irritated me.
The description of the women as one-dimensional people who are just tools for his sexual satisfaction irritated me too. I don't mind a bit of raunch in a book, but Florentino just did not get it right. The section where Dr Juvenal Urbino and Fermina Daza discovered each other were a pleasant exception to the irritating sex in the book. Call me what you like, but sex in a book should make one smile, touch the heart and excite, not irritate.
Yet, the book as a whole, the lovely descriptions and some of the otherwise delicious scenes, made for good reading.
Garcia writes masterfully, I guess I just did not like the direction of this story or the philosophy on love that he presented. Come to think of it, I remember thinking the same thing when reading 'Of Love and Other Demons'.
A man book.

First off, I read a lot. And, I'm a guy. So lot's of Ross Macdonald, Carl Hiassen guy kinds of books. I approached a book about love somewhat hesitantly. But WOW! What a book this was. I'm going to have to think about a while, but it may be the best book I've ever read. I was talking to a friend and telling him to read it but I couldn't clearly articulate what made it so great. The language is wonderful, the plot meanders slowly like every Carribean country I've ever been to, and the characters are rich and developed like family. I didn't want it to end, so I bought 100 Years of Solitude. I think I saw every kind of love I've ever felt somewhere in the book. (And some I haven't) I can't say it strongly enough. Buy and read this book, then give it to someone you love.

Is if it is not for love."
This is the principal theme of Gabriel Garcia Marquez " Love in the Time of Cholera", his greatest novel. The second is waiting for the impossible to come true.
Absolute devotion to an unrequited passion for 50 years? A frock coated inoffensive looking fellow who seduces over seven hundred women to ease his sorrow? Octagenarians acting like besotted adolescents?
What on earth is going on here?
Why, it's true love, of course, in all its indecency, selfishness, dissapointments, self-illusion and beauty.
Sample passage:
"Don't force me to shoot you ", he said.
Florentino Ariza felt his intestines filling with cold froth. But his voice did not tremble because he felt himself illuminated by the Holy Spirit.
"Shoot me," he said, with his hand on his chest. "There is no greater glory than to die for love."
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The novel opens up by introducing us to Dr. Juvenal Urbino. He's received an urgent call. Someone has committed suicide by cyanide.
Here are the author's first words:
" It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. "
The dead man turns out to be his friend and chess partner.
Marquez then proceeds to draws us into the world of Dr. Urbino, vividly and irresistibly. Clearly one feels that the sympathetic Juvenal Urbino is going to be an unforgettable character.
And then we discover that Urbino is not the protagonist.
Say what?

Don't fight it, enjoy the language and take the last riverboat ride down the jungle.
A work of genius and magic.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Edith Grossman, is a story of obsessed love in Latin America in the decades surrounding the year 1900. When very young, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall in love. But Fermina changes her mind and marries a paragon of a young and dedicated and handsome and wealthy and aristocratic doctor named Juvenal Urbino instead. While Fermina and the doctor spend more than fifty years together, many of them happy, have a solid marriage, and raise a family, Florentino obssesses over her and takes on well over 600 lovers to kill the time while he waits for her husband to die. Weird story with weird characters, which can be read as an allegory of love as a fatal and contagious disease, but so well written that Marquez keeps you glued anyway. His prose is lyrical and beautiful, and can sweep the reader away as if on the currents of a magical river.

Florentino Ariza's life changed the first time he laid eyes on the beautiful Fermina Daza. Their relationship began when they were both young and her just a school girl. But it lasted for many many years - in ways neither could have expected. At first their courtship was a secret one, through letters, while Fermina tried to determine how she would convince her father to let them marry. But her father had bigger plans for her. He wanted her to marry up in social class, not below, so he forbade the relationship and took her away for a long journey in an effort to get her to forget Florentino. But her father needn't have worry, because once she arrived back in town and saw Florentino, she, herself, was no longer interested and broke the relationship off abruptly.

Florentino was not one for rejection because he spends the next 50 years of his life pining for Fermina and finding ways to simply catch a glimpse of her. She goes on in life, marries an influential doctor, has children, but her marriage is not without it's own problems. Yet, she loves her husband in his own way. Still Florentino will not be dissuaded and he continues to wait hoping to someday have an opportunity to reclaim the love that he believes is his.

This novel of romance takes place in the Carribean at the turn of the century. It is a coming of age novel as much as it is one of love, historical fiction, and medicine. It is a particularly dense book - each word seems to have been specifically chosen and so it is not a novel that can be skimmed quickly - nor should it. The downfall will be if the story does not speak to the reader. This will be very individual. I, for one, was not grabbed by the story and so I found the read to be slow and at times tedious. For others that can be swept up by the romance and characters it will be a wonderful read. There is no fault to be found with the writing or translation, but this book is a great example of one that rises or falls with very personal preference.

This book is the worst type of book; it starts brilliantly, with the premise and smell of unrequited love, but then it just dies. I felt such relief at finishing, not because- thank God- I know "what happens" but because in good conscience I can now put it away and not have that hankering orange cover staring up at me from my bedstand. I do not mean to suggest that it is a bad book. It is not. But it fails to deliver on its opening promise. And, we never get to know the characters in any capacity greater than their actions. I have no idea if I like or dislike any of the three main characters. In fact, I don't think I care because I couldn't recognize them walking down the street. I felt betrayed by this book. Why couldn't it have been better?

Garcia Marquez can write. No doubt about it. The man is a marvel. I'd be puddling along, reading of Fermina Daza, and her adolescent passion (and his for her) of Florentino Ariza, or of her married life with Juvenal Urbino when I'd be swept away by a phrase or image, or the smell of bitter almonds. REmarkable. Poignant. Humorus. Heartbreaking. So much like life. The unfolding of love after youth has faded to no more than a whisper was an unexpected gift -- we can't all be in our twenties forever, no matter what our inner clock thinks.

It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

I wish I hadn't wasted my time on this book. I was bored all through it, but kept thinking there would be an amazing ending, since other readers seem to be enthusiastic about it. The pace was incredibly slow. The plot was very weak. The characters were not very interesting or likeable. Most of the book had very little to do with love, especially when it concerned Florentino. He may have been in love with the idea of love, but he suffered from an obsession with Fermina, not with actual love, and in the meantime he has 662 affairs, two of which lead to the death of the woman and young girl he seduced, one by murder at the hands of a jealous husband, the other by suicide of his teenage ward, who he first seduces and then rejects. I found his character to be repulsive and incredibly self-centered. His obsession with enemas did not make him him anymore appealing. And no, there was no amazing ending.

A great classic book to read and keep. Marquez makes you live every second of the book, shows you how life takes the most unusual paths, but no matter how much time passes by, and what people go through, some people never change. They just keep on trying to improve themselves all the time, and tackle life from every direction just to try to make their dreams come true.
The selection of words, the progress of events, the describing of emotions is just so incredible, everything has been selected to take your maxiumum attention, and it really does...
"Fermina, 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." Thus does Florentino Ariza lay bare his heart to Fermina Daza after - by the former's exact count - 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days of yearning.
Demonstrates the relationship between people, what does the travelling add to people, and why do we have the tendency to run away from things sometimes...

Marquez is a master of magical realism who is able to deliver the most earthy observations next to scenes of almost ethereal beauty all with a mastery of language that has few modern equals. In this book, Florentino Ariza loses his love and waits 52 years until her husband dies to try to reclaim her again. To do so, he must convince Fermina Daza that love is a state of grace, not a means to an end but an end in itself.

His commitment to love lives within him alongside a continuing search for his identity. When he meets Fermina, he becomes "another person, despite his firm decision and anguished efforts to continue to be the same man he had been before his mortal encounter with love." And while he waits to be with his love again, he has 622 relations with other women which, he believes, does not stop him from being a virgin.

While he is the poet, he needs Fermina's grounding in reality. It is she who believes that the problem in public life is to overcome terror while the challenge of married life is to overcome boredom.

The book is far more than the story or the endearing characters. At it's best, Marquez' language is transporting. Thomas Pynchon described it in a New York Times review in 1988: (Marquez) voice "has been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and, when called upon, take off and soar."

Looking back over the book, I find passages and observations that have stuck in my head for almost 20 years although I long ago forgot where they originated. If you have not discovered Marquez, you will be adding a new source of richness to your life as you begin to read.

There are glowing reviews of this book which summarize the plot so I won't repeat. I read this book for the first time many years ago and at that time was a "fast reader" and was just looking for a good plot; the book did nothing for me then. I reread it just recently and have had a totally different experience. First of all, I've learned that one doesn't have to read a book in one setting (as someone else recommended), and I've learned to spend more time thinking about the characters and less about what is happening.

This book is not a "beach read" and I can see that some just won't get it (that's not a put down, but I just don't see this book for everyone). It is extremely well written, beautiful in places, humorous in others, too detailed in some points with too many minor characters, yet totally memorable. The final 100 pages are just spellbinding.

This is a book about love and obsession. I'm glad I took the time to reread it when I'm older (hopefully wiser) and with definitely more time.

All things aside, an old man having sex with his young charge is weird to our eyes. This love is not the central concern in the book, but pops up in some reviews. I got this book because I read an earlier novel by the same writer and found that his work was fantastic....if only he chose something else to write about. Granted, the earlier book was much shorter, so when I thumbed throug hwith my right hand on what I had left, I was much more forgiving. This book, however, was hard to read. While GGM is a "great writer" in terms of how he writes, I don't care about the "things" he writes about. His topics make it hard for me to care.

One of my favorite books. I read this again a couple of months ago. Florentino Ariza's 50 year unrequited love for the haughty Fermina Daza is an amazing allegory of human love. When Fermina marries another man, Florentino doesn't ever give up. Doggedly he spends his life planning for their eventual getting together. In a way he is a ridiculous Don Quixote, undaunted by reality, pining over a lost cause. Somehow this bizarre little man hopes on. No, he doesn't hope. He insists. He becomes president of the local shipping company, he redecorates his childhood home with his love in mind, his love of the arts mirrors his love for her. Why does this work? Marquez is just a genius. He simply lets the characters tell their story and he writes down their words. And so they come to life.

I wish love were more like cholera, because then more of the tiresome and uninteresting characters in this book would have died off, and made the whole thing considerably shorter.

To be fair: I loved the writing. Well, most of it. It would have been better had there been less of it; I started out reveling in Márquez's lush descriptions, but after about 100 pages I felt like I was drowning in words. He offered some beautiful pieces of insight that were strangled by over-writing, and would have been much better appreciated had he allowed them to stand out against more economical passages. Reading it was exhausting. I love Thomas Hardy and I still thought this was exhausting.

The other drawback is that there is so little plot and the characters are so unlovable. Juvenal Urbino is the most interesting, and he dies. Fermina is contradictory, spoilt, and difficult to figure out, and Florentino is self-absorbed and, frankly, demented. This is a book that involves a lot of obsession, lust, domestic obligation, and sex, but very little love.

Imagine you are at a party. A man you don't know comes up to talk to you and at first you are very impressed with his story and his language. Then, after awhile you think "yeah, great guy, but I need to go now". THEN after an hour more, you want to crawl out of your shoes and go home and watch TV. But he won't shut up...

This is how I felt reading this novel. LOVED parts of it but it just beat me to death. One affair after another, one character after another...it may be the first book I abandoned mostly with only 50 pages left (I skimmed the rest).

Go ahead, read it, but be prepared for a challenge in patience.

"Fermina, 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." Thus does Florentino Ariza lay bare his heart to Fermina Daza after - by the former's exact count - 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days of yearning.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA tells of lifelong relationships and a lifelong obsession. Though the book doesn't indicate a time and locale for the storyline, it apparently takes place in a Colombian coastal town between, say, 1890 and 1950. During that period, Ariza's two opportunities to win the love of Fermina are separated by the latter's 50-year marriage to Dr. Juvenal Urbino.
I must say up front that I think this novel will be better appreciated by female readers. However, I'm giving it 5 stars, not because my testosterone level is necessarily low, but because I myself enjoy stringing words together, and author Gabriel García Márquez is a master par excellence of that talent. I especially liked his technique of stating a relatively simple fact, and then telling in glorious detail how it got that way. For instance, within the first few pages he relates that Urbino's talking parrot escaped to the backyard mango tree, then dedicates 5 full pages of text to the background of the calamity. And, after Daza makes the statement that heads this review, the next 225 pages to the paths the three principal characters travel to arrive at that point. Throughout the narrative, Gabriel's prose is lush, flowery, and richly detailed, and credit must be given to the translator, Edith Grossman.
The vast majority of the text is devoted to the Urbinal-Daza marriage, which, I suspect, follows the same evolutionary course as many others in real life, and a number of other, more transient or transitional love relationships. Regarding the bonds that tie a man and woman together, I venture that Márquez is a wise observer, as indicated by the following excerpts:
"After their first encounters they had both lost awareness of their ages, and they treated each other with the familiarity of a husband and wife who had hidden so many things in this life that there was almost nothing left for them to say to each other."
And an observation by Daza: "It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems ... and not really know if it was love or not."
LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA is the splendid creation of one of the twentieth century's most gifted writers.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez sits next to Kurt Vonnegut at the authorial round table in my mind. The two are inexorably linked for me not necessarily due to their art but because I discovered them both late in their own lives and remember being pleasantly surprised upon learning that both were still alive after I fell in love with their prose. And now because they’re both gone, and I regret having never created the opportunity to see either one of them. Thankfully the words they’ve left behind are a wonderful testament to two very different and unique voices that still resonate with me today. As much as Dostoevsky’s White Nights was still on my mind when I started this, with Love in the Time of Cholera, Marquez reached from beyond the grave and pushed me face-first through the mirror self-understanding that has left me in a daze for over a month as I’ve tried to figure out just exactly what this book was supposed to mean to me. Love in the Time of Cholera remained on the fringes of my reading consciousness for years after reading 100 Years of Solitude and Memories of My Melancholy Whores as I was too frightened to embark upon the journey… I thought I knew the author, I thought I knew this work, and I felt like I knew what he had to say. Most tellingly, however, I felt as though I’d been living this story, and I didn’t want to uncover my ending through the ink on a page. I didn’t want it to end happily and bolster my belief in a dreamt unreality. I didn’t want it to end sadly and find myself paralyzed with fear of a life wasted, and I didn’t want it to end in an unforeseen way lest I begin to wait for the second lightning strike which surely, at this point, remains wholly in the domain of the young and unfazed romantics. I did not expect for it to end in such a way that I was forced to question the foundations of my beliefs in life, Love, and Self, nor did I expect to end up ruminating on the idea of “choice” out of the multitude of themes presented here. That, I suppose, is why we read.

So I read, but with my walls up – still fearful of holding a mirror too closely and having my own mistakes and missteps magnified in the reflection. I was determined to remain aloof and removed from this story I thought I already knew, but before I’d read a single word I was stuck. I praise the Everyman’s editions too often and too loudly, but this introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare was brilliant and nearly as poignant as the novel itself. It reached out, grabbed me by the throat, and pulled me headfirst and fearless (sorry, I just *had* to!) into a fascinating story that, instead of focusing my introspection, ended up forcing me take a step back and see Love as the lifelong choice that it has to be. I typically find so much value in these introductions because they shine a bright light on the history and background of times and cultures I never knew. Shakespeare’s intro certainly had those academic qualities to it, but it was his love for the story itself that burned through and branded itself on me in such a way that I was able to approach it not with apprehension but with a sense of wonder and excitement akin to reuniting with a long estranged friend. Rarely has a stranger’s description of someone else’s work been so complete and full of admiration that it made me drop my own preconceptions and simply hope to find something that would awaken in me the same sense of awe and appreciation.

So I began this with extremely high expectations but an open mind and found myself fully and immediately engaged in Marquez’s truthful fictionalization of the world around me. Completely eschewing linear chronology and the typical structure of chapters, Marquez created an environment in which there were no heroes and no villains – if there was a protagonist, the protagonist was the eternally ephemeral concept of Love and not, contrary to my assumptions, one individual chasing it. Marquez devoted so much attention to the matured love affair between Fermina and Dr. Urbino that it was impossible not to weep for the lost future they should have had together. Had the story been more classically structure, I feel like I would have been idealistically stuck in Florentino’s head and heart the entire time... In retrospect it seems fairly obvious that Fermina’s long-lasting relationship was set as a foil to that which Florentino desired to give her. In so many ways I wanted to believe in the purity and supernatural nature of what he described and lived for, but it was impossible to not also see the beauty that grew between Fermina and Dr. Urbino as they continued to build their lives together. I found it depressing that “neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience,” but in the end it did not matter because the Love that grew to exist between them was every bit as real as the explosions in the sky that blinded Florentino throughout his life. Theirs was a slow-burn… a fire that existed and grew not because it was a force of nature but because it progenitors chose to nurture it and let it live. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but it was certainly here where I began to hear Marquez speak to me, not about Love per se, but about choice and about how Love really is something you DO and not something you are simply *in*…

It is, somewhat ironically, Dr. Urbino who pulls me back to my western romanticism as he mourns the loss of his friend and notes that, “it is a pity to still find a suicide that is not for love.” This is heart-rending, not due to his misunderstanding of the suicide, but because, despite the Love they created, he is unable to turn his gaze inward and see what they are still missing in their own lives. While Urbino may have learned how to choose to love he, unlike Florentino, is unable to allow that choice to be pervasive. If Florentino is to be considered a romantic and not a madman it is because he understands that living with Love or living without it both pale in the face of dying with a Love whose fullness was never realized. Few, if any, things are as frightening as the last words of Dr. Urbino while he lay dying and through “tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and managed to say to her with his last breath, ‘Only God knows how much I loved you.’” If God is the only one who knew, then I wept, not for a dying man, but for a Love that never had a chance to fully live. Fermina sadly echoes Urbino’s lamentations as “she prayed to God to give him at least a moment so that he would not go without knowing how much she had loved him despite all their doubts, and she felt an irresistible longing to begin life with him over again so that they could say what they had left unsaid and do everything right that they had done badly in the past.” How… tragic. Was it Ego that led them to a marriage potentially of convenience? Was it Super-Ego that kept them from saying and doing the things they grew to desire with each other? If you are lucky enough to find the opportunity to choose to Love should Id, Ego, and Super-Ego not scream out in unison that the only purpose of life is ensuring that Love is known throughout every fiber of body and soul such that the Universe itself trembles in its presence? Fermina and Urbino *chose* to Love one another, and even without the trappings of atmospheric illuminations, carnal uncertainties, or the unexplained romance of a quickening heartbeat at the mere mention of another’s name they created a life of Love. What they created is admirable, but it is absolutely devastating to see the last light of life flicker and die without the assured knowledge that Love was fully understood, fully given, and fully received. I adore this idea of choice which led to a life full of love, but I am equally disheartened that it did not lead to a Love full of life.

Although I want to claim that I entered into this without narrative expectation I’d be lying if I didn’t say I wanted Florentino’s idea of Love to be the ideal, for him to be the hero, and for an unexplainable and eternal Love to undeniably be the star. I wanted to erase the picture of marital success painted by the choices made by Urbino and Fermina and revel in the idea of some supernatural phenomenon that removed all semblance of choice and replaced it with an undying and inescapable drive created by a Love that exists for only one other fighting for its survival. That, however, was a battle I was going to lose. I had to reconsider Florentino’s devotion now that I was armed with an intimate understanding – lacked by Florentino himself – of just how much Love Fermina was able to create in her life without him. How could he have claimed to Love her while concurrently wishing/hoping/waiting for the death of Dr. Urbino? I subscribe to the notion that Love should be a selfish thing. It is easier to be selfish than selfless, and if I truly Love something, shouldn’t my selfishness manifest itself as selflessness once I give into that Love and follow the course it lays before me? Shouldn’t I wish only for the happiness of the one I Love first and for myself distantly second? As enamored as I was with the fledgling love affair between Florentino and Fermina in the second part of the book… as well as I remember that place, as much as I want for it to exist, and as important, overwhelming, beautiful, and life-changing it is… it is, as with most things, how you use that experience that matters and will either drag you down or keep you afloat for the rest of your life. Florentino made his choice… a choice in which I still want to believe, but Marquez played both sides of the story so well that I found it impossible to be fully taken by any one side of the discussion.

It kills me to see Florentino believe that “any event, good or bad, had some relationship to her.” I understand that notion and what it’s like to think I will wait forever for wholeness to return. I feel his desperate desire, and I want to join him in showing how these fireworks light the sky forever and that my heart will never beat as fully as it does for her. I want to listen with his ears and hear that she is ready to accept a romantic, full, unreasonable, fully inescapable, and real Love. But this, far more than Dostoevsky’s “dream,” appears to be the “dream of a ridiculous man.” I adore his fortitude, but I cannot side with Florentino in his quest to hold onto what is lost – because he is lost in himself. He is lost in himself, and he is lost in time. He is able to build a (nearly) whole and successful life apart from the Love he believes is real, but he fails in three very important areas. First and foremost, in his desire to see an event come to pass which will undoubtedly cause the woman he claims to Love a deep and everlasting pain. He tells himself that he will make her happy… the happiest, but he is willing to inflict so much pain to get there, and I cannot forgive that. Second, he completely removes from himself the possibility that he can experience Love without the singular person of Fermina Daza thus robbing himself (and potentially another) of the opportunity to experience the kind of Love that Fermina and Urbino chose to create together. This is madness… madness borne from a selfishness masquerading as Love. Third, and most eye-opening to me personally, he is unable (until the end) to understand that his is not a quest to retake a past that has been lost but rather an attempt to create a future whose success is not a reflection of that past but rather an entirely new creation whose growth is not necessitated by the existence of the past but is instead birthed from its ashes. He is stuck, and Florentino, I’m afraid, was more in love with Love than he was in Love with Fermina.

I wanted to believe in the undying and unassailable Love of Florentino but in the end it was his persistence with which I became enamored. Although it appears as though his execution was lacking, it was impossible not to fall in love with his dogged determination to remain in Love. The Universe does not tremble because we fall in Love. When it strikes, it is us who tremble, us who fall, who wish, who love, who hope, who fail, and who make a choice. The Universe trembles when, despite all obstacles, we continue to choose to create and nurture Love. Marquez leaves the door open… the ending was neither particularly happy nor sad, and we don’t know whether Fermina and Florentino will be able to create this Love for the rest of their lives. We don’t know if, had Fermina not rejected the young Florentino, she would have lived a life as happy as the one she had with Dr. Urbino. We do not know if his madness and her eventual acquiescence led to a death whose final words were, “We’ve Loved our fullest, I have all of you, and you have all me.” We don’t know, yet there have been few endings as powerful as this one imbued with both the hope of possibility and the sadness of opportunities missed. No one was pure here, and on one was “right,” and Love remains an undefinable enigma. The satisfaction comes not from knowing that Love won but from knowing that it has been given a chance to flourish forever. “Forever,” of course, is a personal and ever-changing commitment, and we never truly know what form it will take or how long we have before our individual “forevers” are buried in the sands of time. What we do know is that we are inherently subsumed by it, and it is, by nature, everything we have to give. The hope is that it never is too late to choose to give your forever to Love. No matter if Florentino was mad or truly in Love, it cannot be denied that he gave his “forever” to Fermina Daza. That he *chose* to give his Forever to her. The fireworks don’t last on their own until the end of time, and although he fails to see the beauty that Fermina and Dr. Urbino were able to create with their choices, Florentino continually exhibits his understanding that while Love may find its genesis in the unexpected, it finds its life in choice. You can’t choose when you fall in Love… you can choose to ignore it or do your best to fall out of it, but Florentino chooses over and over again to continue to believe in his Love for Fermina. Whether it is two years spent uncovering the path up and down the river of life or “fifty-three years, seven months, and eleven days and nights” sailing that path alone until there is an opportunity to give life to a Love that has always existed. Be it madness, Love, or the madness of Love, if we’re lucky we can always find a chance to choose to answer (every day!) the question of how long we can “keep up this coming and going” with each other with the only answer that matters. “Forever.”

I chose to read this book after reading, and loving, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. While 'Love in the Time of Cholera' was much shorter in length, it took me much longer to finish because it wasn't nearly as magnetic of an experience. The main problem with the book is that reading a summary of the plot would have provided the same level of entertainment as reading the book. The basic plot is laid out for you early on, beginning when young Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza. The story begins when both characters are young, naive, careless, and inexperienced in love. When life's realities begin to dawn on them, they take separate life (and philosophical) routes: Fermina Daza decides to marry the doctor Juvenal Urbino, a respectable, wealthy, and kind person, while Florentino refuses to let go of his love for Fermina, even as he ages and experiences other women. This basic plot provokes several important and difficult and perhaps heartbreaking questions; what is 'love'? is 'love' really so exclusive for one person, or do we love everyone in our lives in some manner? Clearly the reader isn't expected to believe that Florentino is Fermina's absolute and true soul mate. But it is interesting that he cannot let go of this belief in his love for her. Though he passes up opportunities for falling in love with other women, perhaps he holds onto something more dear -- the delicate belief that his love is eternal. It's a story to tell for the sake of considering such difficult and sad, yet beautiful ideas.
The problem is that this basic outline confines the story to make it symbolic and inflexible. Each character is a symbol and their humanity is distant, making it hard to feel for them. Since the basic events of the story are either laid out from the beginning, or predictable, a lot of the book feels like just 'going through the motions'. Cholera as a theme is interesting but isn't developed as much as it could have been. It would have been very interesting to integrate the poverty and suffering experienced by those living all around the main characters, and relating that phenomenon to the escapist and self-centered love drama.
So, the book offers some beautiful and thoughtful questions and challenges the reader to ask themselves these questions. However, the telling of the story itself is unremarkable, particularly compared to the richness and unpredictability of the descriptions and events in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'.

This is a book written in rich and beautiful prose. Even in an English translation, the language is musical, picturesque and poetic. The book pretends
to focus on an enduring frustrated love; a rejected
suitor, who continues to love one woman although
she has married another.
Instead, for me, the focus of the book is truly on
the other love story within it; on the amazingly
rich, complex, and true picture of the love,
understanding, and pettiness of a long-standing
marital love. For anyone who has experienced
a "good" marriage, this insightful, poetic, comical
book is a delight.

You can't help but fall in love with the prose, with the characters, with the incredible story that pulls you in.
This is a story about a man, Florentino Ariza, who prefers to endure half a century of longing and loneliness than to betray his one true love. During the course of the story many times I said (aloud!): This is not love! This is an obsession! But in the end, I had to admit (with tears in my eyes at that) that Florentino Ariza owned the essence of love. He also convinced me that there is only one way to love anyone: with one's whole heart and one's whole life and with an unbending faith that love triumphs...eventually.
I gave lesser books five stars. I would have liked to give ten magnificent gold stars to my all-time favorite author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Enjoy.

Just finished reading it.
Enjoyable, poetic, and fine taste of magic realism.
At first, I set out to read a love story--instead, bit by bit, it became a meditation, a dream, and a painting.
Nobody will ever know what exactly went through author's mind, and any decent art-work is subject to audience's interpretation.
But one thing I am sure, it's not about love per se. Love is the hinge on which a vast human theater is holding on--passion, poverty, war, disease, small town politics, bad breath, body odor, reality of old age, human complexes that make us human etc.
This is a novel without an end, and without a demarcation line, and I guess that's make it more enjoyable.
However, I often found the book too long-winding. Certain detail was little too slow coming and reaching to a point. Yet, I must give credit to Mr Garcia for excellent style of prose--I call it delicious-word-cooking.
A new writer could learn a lot about story-telling from this book though.
I have yet to read his most widely known "One Hundred Years Of Solitude."
One reviewer commented on lacking the theme LOVE in the book.
Without going into too in depth about "symbolism" and similar literary bs, I express humble opinion that in this book, love is an excuse to explore many colors of human canvas, pure and simple.
The words of Garcia are beautifully arranged--and the way he uses dry humor is also enjoyable--very similar to tragic comedy. What is nice that the encounters he attributes to Mr Ariza do not seem impossible. However mathematically/biologically speaking the number seems kind of odd. 622/53= 12 (about) girls a year for long term liaisons as claimed by Ariza. Can you have long term liaisons with 12 girls in one year, and break up and have 12 more LONG TERM liaison next year for 53 years.You do the math.
For an artist like Mr Garcia, this small mathematical reality may be irrelevant. After all, it's magic that counts in a novel like this. And Garcia is a good magician of words--or should I say Merlin of words?

I'll be honest, I put this down around page 50. I went back to it four months later, this time with a different outlook.

**do not** read Love in the time of Cholera as a story. It makes no sense, the characters aren't likable, and the plots are plain silly (really, someone is going to pine after a woman he never even spoke to, for 50 years? And when he finally hooks up with her, he must first call off his sexual outings with his 14 year old niece?).

**do** read this if you are looking for an experience that will cause your hands to tremble so badly that you'll need to set the book down and take a deep breath. Garcia is a genius when read between the lines. 'Making love by the old lighthouse because there is seemed like a shipwreck'. HIs scene on the two types of people: 'those who make love and those who do not'. And finishing with the 'first signs of frost' and the lady love's eyebrows.

Garcia is also funny, so often I was shaking in my seat. A wonderful, wonderful read.

After reading - and hating One Hundred Years of Solitude (P.S.) - I felt I owed it to myself (and to Marquez) to give him another chance. I am so glad I did. _Love in the Time of Cholera_ is lyric, beautiful and moving. It is about love - unrequited love, the intracacies of marriage, the differences between mere physical love and that deeper, most noble of emotions. It is also about life. A romantic, I was deeply struck by the depth of emotion the characters share and the committment one will make in the name of love.

As teens, Florintino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall desparately in love. Yet as she matures, Fermina "outgrows" her feelings and is married to a physician, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who later becomes a pillar of the community. In spite of this, Florintino continues to love Fermina, watching her from afar, waiting fifty-one years for her husband to die in order for him to once again enter her life. Of course, with such a passage of time, both Florintino and Fermina have changed, and therefore their relationship and their love must also change. As Marquez writes, "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."

Typical with Marquez (and other Latin American writers), the story line is non-linear. Rather, it begins with the lovers at the end of their lives and through a series of flashbacks gradually brings readers to climax of the story. Unlike _One Hundred Years of Solitude_, however, there is less confusion around events and characters - I found this story much more easy to follow. That it was concerned with love (and passion, and life and poetry) also contributed tremendously to my interest in and willingness to follow the story.

The writing is magnificent - there are so many beautiful turns of phrase and sentiments about love, loss and life that I cannot share them all here. Suffice it to say that, along with Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa (Modern Library), Alfred Doeblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (Continuum Impacts), and Leo Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (Oprah's Book Club), this is among my all-time favorite books. Highly recommended.

I wanted to love this book. Marquez's style is charmingly poetic and melodramatic. I love reading his graceful, quirkily-descriptive language. But a couple hundred pages in and I realized that the characters never grow, and what's worse, I didn't care about them. Finally, at page 271 the main character's affair with a fourteen-year-old girl was presented as normal, and I put the book down in protest.

Love in the Time of Cholera was highly recommended by a friend of mine, who absolutely loved it, so we chose it for our next bookclub selection. There are four of us in the group, with a wide range of literary likes and dislikes. Two of the group couldn't finish it, while two of us finished it with mixed reviews.
Overall, I agree with most that Garcia has a wonderful way of painting a colorful picture. On the other hand, I found the text to drag on, perhaps capturing the eternity of the main character to obtain the object of his desire.
I only recommend this book for those who enjoy a long, descriptive, sometimes redundant narrative.

Well...I think the title of my review says it all - this novel, in my humble opinion, stands as the best of his many highly accomplished and beautifully written novels. I don't even know how to go about reviewing this except by saying that it's an unconventional love story about two people who fall in love through words - more specifically, the writing of letters. In many ways, it conjures up a slightly different version of Book 5 of Dante's "Inferno" in the sense that although it is not books that bring the two young lovers together, it is still the written word. Unfortunately, or fortunately, 57 years pass before the two of them finally find one another, although only one of the two has been pining after his lost love, pining away by having dozens and dozens of affairs with women from all walks of life.

The language is about as fantastic as it gets. There is a certain weight behind each sentence that makes every one both poetic and full of imagery, but at the same time very quick and easy to read. The novel flows so beautifully through time, events, and people, that you can't help but be caught up in it. Unlike in 100 Years of Solitude where you can feel the historical weight weighing down the otherwise pristine novel, this one blends all aspects of the novel into a masterpiece.

Simply the best from one of the best.

Of Course when you start this book your perception is about finding two lovely hearts in tough times. Its way bigger and better than that. Gabriel Garcia Marquez weaves a story , a life , an expression beautifully. Read it for a feel of those times, streets, emotions and supreme reading pleasure. No Doubt he is a genius when it comes to literature. There is no sentence that isn't an allegory. Power packed booked with a good plot and smooth reading is what you get when you read this. One of the traits of the author is that he takes you to that period and you can associate with the book as if you are part of it.

They have made a motion picture as well and I am sure more will come with the story and intrigue it holds for each one of us.

Its a story of triumph and emotional will and of a boy who succeeds under failing circumstances.

Enjoy the power of words and the story it creates

I read this in Spanish, so I cannot vouch for the translation. In the original Spanish, El amor en los tiempos de cólera, this is one of the best books I have ever read. If you have ever really loved someone and could not be with them, you will identify with the main male character, Florentino, in the book. Even though he is in love Fermina and meets her when she is very young, she marries another man. Her husband Juvenal is a doctor and provides her a secure life. Fifty years later, Florentino still loves her and has that deep soul mate longing for her. However, this is just the plot and this book is so much more than a great story. Garcia Marquez is a brilliant writer and entire courses of study have been designed around his works. Power Path to Love

I have read three books in my life which I acknowledge as life-altering. The first was Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, which told me I wasn't an idiot for seeing some pretty stunning irony in government and the images my schooling had taught me to respect in America. I was never the same.
Number two was Rescuing the Bible from the Fundamentalists. If you've ever been deeply troubled by the religious tradition handed down to you, yet unable to escape a spiritual dimension to your life, this is a book to read. I did, and never been the same.
Last is Love in the Time of Cholera. I actually tried to start it three times, and couldn't get going. I didn't particularly like One Hundred Years of Solitude, and my hopes were waning. But, I gave it another go, and by the time I finished reading, I felt so utterly consumed by its beauty, that I couldn't sleep, my mind still abuzz.
What captured me was the language and the images, and the feeling in my heart, which started small and grew steadily with each passing page to an all encompassing glow, of overwhelming wonderfulness. (I apologize for messy little phrase, but words fail) The last word of the book, when you read it, will set you free to fly. The beauty will wrap you up like a blanket amidst a cold, clever, too smart for its own good literary world. You will breath in it's lush jungle of humanity, and never quite leave it.
This is a great book. Read it.

G.G. Màrquez is a master in dissecting, analyzing and evocating mankind's sex, love and marriage scene, like `the terror of a virgin bride'.

As one of his main characters explains: `the world is divided into those who scr.w and those who do not. He distrusts those who do not.'
Those who scr.w often, form a secret society. They `felt so good that their lips were sealed, because they knew that their lives depended on their discretion.' For them, blennorrhagias, warts, swollen lymph glands and impetigo in the groin are `the spoils of war'.

`Love is spiritual from the waist up and physical from the waist down.' `Nothing in the world is more difficult than love.'

Marriage is `an absurd invention against all scientific reason. It ends every night after making love and must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.' More, `after ten years of marriage women have their periods as often as three times a week.'

This book tells the story of a decades long hidden adoration of a lady who married a -for the family - more presentable man. After the burial of her husband, the (for the public) secret pretender cries out his fanatical love again. Can this `Romeo' convince his `Julia' to form a couple in their old days?

G.G. Màrquez is a remarkable story teller with perspicacious eyes for mankind's secret or open sexual and emotional life.

Not to be missed.

The only reason I witheld the last half star was that I think the book is not quite as profound as it could be, and that is, I think, only beciuse it is written entirely from the male experience.
OK, OK, I'll give it the 5th star because the author's not at fault for being gender-limited!
I thought it was evocative, sweeping, poetic and all that has been said, and I was happy to be reading it. The language is quite beautiful. But somehow I just didn't quite buy the pathetic unrequited love at its core. Can't quite put my finger on why not.
I agree it explored all sorts of types of love, and the descriptive passages of place were also highly evocative.

This is a book that simply cannot to be ignored. Lush, sensual and poetic in its prose, Marquez spins a vivid tale about a man's love for a woman that waits fifty years to come to fruition. Beneath the imagery and romance, however, lies Marquez's sharp observations on the nature of relationships, marriage and old age -- all told with Marquez's brand of humor, wisdom and unflinching veracity.
The imagery pops alive in the mind's eye like no film can. In a tropical Caribbean setting, sometime between the close of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the environment becomes just as much a character as Florentino Ariza, and the dramatic story unfolds of his love for Fermina Daza. I'd love to recommend this for mature teens, but to truly savor it, you'll have to have lived a little. In the end, no matter what age, you will be the better for having read this masterpiece!

This is the type of novel that I miss from my college days - the type that your professor would assign - so you surreptitiously approach with willful trepidation: that's what Marquez offers us here. Two characters who are masters of the art of 'willful trepidation'. Fermina Daza shines as the perfect wife of Dr. Urbino, unaware of her husband's infidelities, until the posthumous, mortifying encounters that she faces with the grace of a Victorian lady. Florentino Ariza, her admirer of more than 50 years, engages in 622 affairs that appear egregious in nature, but serve a purpose for the end. Although some may find this difficult to endure, it is well worth the concluding payoff - one that proves that true love does exist.

For several days, I pondered: "Do I classify this as 'literary' or 'page turner'? As an elitist reader, I sparingly label books with the 'literary' label: only ones that I envision my professor and I debating on a sunny afternoon in the courtyard. The 'page turners' are usually labeled as 'bestsellers', not for their depth, but for their voracious plot lines. This book embodied both: translated from Spanish, the vernacular requires full analysis - this is NOT a beach read. However, the surprising turns that Florentino's tortured life endures {while he awaits his *true* love} will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Marquez is a revered author - his work extraordinary. Thrilled with One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera maintained his status quo. Bravo!

I was really enjoying this novel until about half way through when it degenerated into the sexual exploits of Florentino Ariza who can only be described as a sex maniac, stalker, pedophile and rapist. The casualness of his pedophilia and raping bothered me. Are we supposed to admire this man who waited 51 years, 9 months and 4 days to win the hand of Fermina Daza, the woman he loved? Not me. When in their youth, Fermina eventually rejected him so he tried erasing her memory by having sex with as many "little birds", as he called young women and girls, as he could. He also set his sights on married women and widows, all of whom dropped their panties within minutes of knowing him, that is unless he raped them. Not too believable considering his physical description. I know some women prefer the Woody Allen type to the hot hunk but really! It seems that many authors, GGM included, spend an inordinate amount of time describing sex scenes. Maybe they get aroused when writing. The pedophilia was sex with America Vicuna, a 14-year-old girl of whom he was supposed to be her guardian! They become lovers and have sex on a daily basis. He was in his 70s! Later, when America finds love letters between Florentin and Fermina, she commits suicide. On one hand, I am reminded of Nabokov's Lolita and on the other, Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, a man with no moral compass. Why was Vicuna included in the story? It wasn't necessary. It only served to enhance Florentino's image as a morally decrepit man. GGM does not flatter women. He even includes a woman who falls in love with a man who raped her (not Florentino this time) because she found the experiences exhilarating, the man's smell, his physicality. Somehow, Fermina never found out about his escapades and, when in their old age, someone tried to inform her, she refused to listen and instead defended him. It is unfortunate that Florentino won her in the end (they were in their 80s by then). All this said, I still give this novel three stars because it was well written and easy to read. We don't have to like all of the characters to appreciate a novel in its totality. If so, I would have given Lolita two stars.

I first read this book many years ago. It has since remained my most favorite story of all time. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's story-telling is magnetic. In this book, he brilliantly chronicles South America's riches, struggles and history, and so genuinely captures the many forms of love.

While many episodes and many characters sweep through this novel; Fermina and Florentino's relationship is the most memorable. Theirs isn't the perfect love story. In fact, it is anything but. Florentino's love for Fermina is tortured and desperate and heart-achingly futile. But this raw honesty is what captures you. It is an immortal and unchanging love that is self-deprecating and masochistic yet so pure. Florentino Ariza's acts of love are so bizarre yet his loyalty is so endearing.

This is a love story for the annals. Unchanging, unwavering and real. Loyalty like this is the stuff of fairytales. A must-read for hopeless romantics and a literary piece of hope for those who desperately want to believe.

I received this book recently as a gift. I had actually read it many years back - 87/88 - and always knew that I loved it, but couldn't really remember why. I feel like reading this as an adult was a little like seeing ET again as an adult. There was a newness and wonderment from experiencing it again from a totally different vantage point. I have so much more life experience and can relate so much better to the characters. The foolish idealism of young love, the novelty of new lovers, the safety of old lovers, the pragmatism of marital love. I hadn't experience any of these things as a wet behind the ears high school student. I recommend this to anyone as a worthy book to read again and relish.

Well, this will be the first and last time I ever read anything with the label 'Oprah's Book Club' on it. To think I actually thought this would be a depressingly romantic novel. Well, it only took me about half a year to realise that this was one of the most painful reads I've ever experienced. I don't understand the appeal, now that I have finally completed it. I wanted heartbreaking anguish, torturous characters. But what I got was a mopey stalker type novel, who's main character reaches pedophile levels. And we were supposed to feel sorry for him?

The writing is stuffy and laborous and would not have been so utterly boring if the actual story was a bit more interesting. I connected with none of the characters and I barely felt the passing of 50 years in the novel. It seemed rushed, but at the same time, I felt as if the book would never end.

It all seemed completely unrealistic to me and while I can understand how someone would find this book appealing and romantic, It had the opposite effect for me.

This story opens in the aftermath of the death of
Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. His friends gather and discuss
Jeremiah's movements which led to his suicide, by
gold cyanide poisoning. The dead man's friend, Dr Juvenal
Urbino, decides that there is no need for an autopsy, and
points out to the disappointed medical intern,
deprived of this opportunity to learn "There is bound
to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the
the chance one of these days"....."And when you do find one,
observe with care. They almost always have crystals in their heart."
Jeremiah's secret love of many years, a mulatta of
powerful presence, had played chess with the old man
on his last night, and knew that he wished for death.
She had beaten him in the game, and "She insisted
that she deserved no praise, but rather that Jeremiah
de Saint-Amour, already lost in the mists of death,
had moved his pieces without love."

The scene thus set, the real story begins. The
Mulatta's complicity in Jeremiah's last actions
underscores the most powerful theme of this book:
the power of love. Briefly, this is the story of a man
who lives for the love of a woman. They meet as
teenagers, and are separated by her disapproving father.
But the young man, Florentino Ariza, pursues his
hopeless love, the beautiful but haughty Fermina Daza,
for fifty years. She becomes the reson for his life,
consumes his every thought, and eventually becomes
his after the death of her beloved husband, the same
Dr Juvenal Urbino of the opening scene. A common plot
indeed, and one which lends itself to melodrama -
but not in the hands of Marquez. This story is told
with the mastery and magic of all of Marquez's
books, and we believe in the characters, and the plot,
because they are essentially true.
The beautiful language, so expressive of wonder
and sadness, and so full of aching truths that we can
all share, is what sets this book apart.
Marquez builds characters like no-one else can. They
follow nature rather than norm, they live
passionate and colourful lives, and when their
time comes, they die with dignity, and sometimes
panache, leaving this world before their presence
becomes dissonant, before the colours dry. Fate and
fatality are accepted in this world which sets
traditional knowledge and instinct above science,
commerce and law. And the result is a book which,
like all of Marquez, is a joy to read and re-read.

Anthony Nelson.

"Love In the Time of Cholera" is a powerful story of a man who experienced many different flavors of love, both good and bad. The main plot is about unrequited love involving Florentino and his love for Fermina who he can't be with because she chooses to marry another. The story spans over fifty years until Fermina's husband dies, and they are together and consummate their love. In the meantime, Florentino tries to find love through many sexual conquests, often with little regard for the women and sometimes with very tragic results. Florentino couldn't give his heart to anyone other than Fermina.

The book is well written, with great description, characters, and dialogue.

[...]

"Love in the time of cholera" was written by Nobel prize winning author Gabriel García Márquez's in 1985. Originally written in Spanish, it was translated into English in 1988. Set roughly between 1880 and 1930, the characters live in an unnamed port city in the Carribean. The story traces the lives of the two main characters Fermina and Florentino from a passionate teenage romance through a long separation (as Fermina marries another man) and into old age. After their separation as teenagers, Florentino waits (more or less) for Fermina to be free of her husband. Their separate social spheres occasionally overlap with trivial social encounters that appear to fuel Florentino's devotion - whilst simultaneously driving him into the arms of other women for solace. Much as Florentino does, the reader must bear with the characters until the end of the novel to find out if Florentino's unrequited love is ever given a second chance.

For me, reading "Love in the time of cholera" was a little like eating porridge for breakfast - you know it's probably good for you but it is nowhere near as enjoyable as french toast. A relatively minor issue is Márquez's disturbing habit of infrequently introducing a narrator into the story with the use of "our" - a jarring addition.

More frustratingly, Márquez dallies at length with, but ultimately dispatches with two characters early in the book. This leaves the reader looking for a character to care about. Fermina and Florentino are introduced, perhaps belatedly, towards the end of the first chapter. However, even once the two main characters are identified, it remains difficult to care about them.

Initially, I thought it was the unfamiliar physical landscape that bothered me. Márquez describes the city in great detail - it is almost a character in its own right - but does not name the country or city in which the novel is set. This was quite frustrating, as I kept trying to `place' the novel and wondering whether I'd missed a paragraph.

Ultimately, however, it is the unfamiliar moral landscape that derailed the novel for me. If "Love in the time of cholera" describes "love", it is a love that I hope never to experience. Florentino's teenage love for Fermina is little more than an adolescent crush that he can't grow out of. Fermina's relationship with her husband (which persists for the greater part of the novel) honestly depicts the mundane details of a marriage but lacks the tenderness and mutual sacrifice that characterise marriage at its best. Florentino's repeated dalliances with other women (excused by his frustrated `love' for Fermina) appear to involve lust more than love. The world of perpetually available, uninhibited women and sexual encounters without consequence inhabited by Florentino is based, I hope, more in the author's imagination than any real social landscape. Florentino's affair with a 14 year old (with tragic consequences for the child) is base and merely serves to further diminish his character.

Throughout the novel, Márquez appears determined to tarnish any character or situation with the potential to be decent or upright. A perennial iconoclast, his landscapes all ultimately suffer desolation or decay. Similarly, his characters appear incapable of fidelity, genuine compassion or selflessness. The saccharine ending does not redeem the book - it is undermined by it. Having accompanied Márquez on an emotionally corrupt journey it is difficult, if not impossible, to accept that the future of the book's characters holds anything worthwhile. The book provoked a strong reaction in me, so I must admit it was well crafted, but the reaction was one of disillusionment and disappointment. In my opinion, Love in the time of Cholera adds nothing uplifting or inspiring to the human story. I can't recommend it.

Theres very little I could add about the experience of reading this book that the other reviewers haven't already noted...obviously, it has impressed many readers, and rightfully so. Marquez paints a vivid landscape of a time, place, and culture, both it's deprivation and it's beauty, while illustrating how the advances in technolgy of the early twentieth century slowly seep in as the story plays out its fifty-year plus time span. The setting he creates is so vibrantly alive that you are instantly transported to his locale, experiencing all the changes side by side with the characters. An ode to love in all its many forms and shapes, "Cholera" is an elegently crafted fable brimming with the all the hope and foibles of the human landscape. It's most exceptional quality is its ending, its one of those rare books where the reader does not feel cheated by the last page, and feels that the journey they have invested in has been worthwhile and complete. Marquez offers a solid closure to his tale that is optomistic without appearing trite, happy without the sacchrine acidity of sentimentality.

My husband went into a bookstore to get me a book for our first anniversary and requested a love story. He was told that Love in the Time of Cholera was the best love story in existence, and subsequently brought me a lovely hardback edition. It is certainly my favorite work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps because it is short on the magical realism that permeates his other novels. Marquez has a gift of taking unlikely characters and situations and turning them into stories that ring distinctly true. There are several types of love in this novel: childish infatuations that dissolve or degenerate into obsession, love that begins as dislike and matures into dependence, friendships, and many sexual pairings of varying emotional involvement. Marquez also describes the Magdalena river with such love that I long to see it, an impossible wish as even during the timeframe of the novel it no longer exits as it once did.

It took me three days to finish this modern classic work by Garcia Marquez.

The author is definitely the genius with enormous talent. What I've enjoyed the most during the reading was being involved with specific slow, poetic mood and rhythmic pace of his writing (5 stars for excellent translation). His way of describing a colonial, hot Caribbean city with all its diversity and folklore is superb and mesmerizing.

But...of course there is a "but".

And here I have to agree with some reviewers considering the main characters of the book. They are non-memorably, shadowy or psychotic. It's really hard to find them charismatic or likeably.

Despite of the author assurance in the narrative of deep, patient and everlasting love which Florentino Ariza feels toward his heroine, there is the lack of spiritual depth and wisdom in his life-actions. What's worse the real love is totally confused with obsession, lust and self-indulgency. Florentino is a stalker, sexual predator, and in the end pedophile, and his pseudo-love to Fermina Daza looks more like obsession of the hunter, who cannot catch and "eat" his favorite prey.

There is description after description of Florentino numerous affairs with his libertine women, which number I've rather found boring and unnecessary for the plot.

My book club selected this book thinking it was a love story and thinking that it would be a good read since it was made into a movie, but we were wrong on both assertions. I think I may have been the only one to finish it. Just as The Great Gatsby and just as Romeo and Juliet are not love stories, if you look closely beneath the prose and under what Marquez writes about Florentino, the crazed lover, you will find that this is not a love story either, but a question of the importance of stability in life. I'm not sure if this was what Marquez was getting at but who we side with, may tell us a lot about us but it will not make us swoon and wish we had a lover as crazy as Fermina Daza's.

It is hard for me to critize the great man, but this books doesn't work for me. In fact, it upset me.
The prose and storytelling have the typical magic touch of Marquez, with an eye for details and a ethereal way to tell a mundane story. Where the novel succeeded, it succeeded spectacularly. The first quarter of the novel is as close to perfect as is humanly possible. Then it goes downhill (after Femina rejected Flourentino).
In terms of plot, I feel that Flourentino's nocturnal career of being alternately a sexual predator and prey is _way_ overdone. It is understandable that he will resort to that avenue of satisfaction, but the endless litany of widows, whores, etc, soon gets repetitive and adds nothing to the development of charater or story. Just some page filler. I confess that I tried three times to finish the book and failed each time, right when Dr. Urbina is dead. That is where my complaint lies: Where the book fails, it doesn't fail gracefully, but with total revulsion. I couldn't finish the book, because of Flourentino's peodophilic adventure (sleeping with his 13 year old grandniece, where he is 78). The visereal reaction just could not let me "witness" Flourentina finally win his love battle and sweet-talk Femina to his bed. I don't know why Marquez put this particular detail here. I have no problem with sexual perversions of the kind, but please, do it artfully and with sympathy (like Lolita), not this another trophy in an old man's many conquests. I sincerely believe that the depiction of women in relation to Flourentino is not true, but a sign of the author's mysogenism.
Flourentino's as pathetic and pathologic case of Narcissism sheds some interesting light. Femina and Juvenal by themseleves are not vivid characters, but their interplay in a domestic love relation is very well depicted.
The last thing I complain of is Marquez's stylistic quirk. Or I should say his weakness in writing dynamic and minute dialogues. All the dialogues in the book are one-liners, punch lines of a joke or witticism. Initially they are refreshing. After a while, they get old, becoming showoffish, condescending, corny. There are two drawbacks: 1. One-liners are offputting to the reader; 2. They rob the characters of their lives and make the author's mouthpiece.
For these various reasons, I cannot give the novel any rating higher than 3 stars. And you won't miss much if you decide to put down the book after the half way mark.

One really good thing about vacations is that one gets time to read really, really good books during that time. "Love in the Time of Cholera" is one of those gems. If anyone ever wanted to truly understand "marriage love" the first chapter of this book is explaining it better than any manual or marriage cancelor out there. After reading the first chapter, I just had to keep going, because I was absolutely intrigued with the storytelling and common wisdom of the wonderful writer like Marquez. I recommend this book for everyone!

This is a rather unusual book - not in its subject matter as there are many that deal with the on-going impacts of unrequieted or unfulfilled love, but more that it deals with the subject matter in such a beautiful and lyrical manner.

This is a book that you read for the sheer pleasure of the writing. It loops along and sweeps you through the character's lives, letting you know that even if you cannot have the one you love and come to love (even for a short time) another, you can still yearn for your soul mate with all the passion that you had when you were young.

I'm sure this book will have its detractors, and it does have its foibles with its side characters and side issues, but it is really, really beautiful, and well worth your attention.

Highly recommended!

"LOVE IN TIME OF CHOLERA"
By Gabriel García Márquez
Can we defined what it is love? How many kinds of love there are? When we know we
are in love, Can we know it? When we know is just something transitory? How we know
this is the right person to marry? These are some of the themes that Gabriel García
Márquez portrays in this interesting novel.
This book shows that love is not always perfect and the illness of cholera are the same
that the illness of love. This novel shows us that love can come unexpected and the same
time can change very quickly. Love is not constant and sometimes changes people's live.
Love can do powerful things and this is reflected in Florentino Ariza who loved Fermina
Daza for more that fifty years.

This novel shows the large definition of love and one kind of love that we see is the love
between Fermina Daza and her husband, Dr, Urbino. At first neither of them are in love
but with time they begin to love each other "he was aware that he did not love her"(159)
" but as she kissed him for the first time he was sur e there would be no obstacle to their
inventing true love". (159) With the passing of the years, when they were old, the love
changed to a more mature defition of love.
This is an awesome book with unexpected ending. I recommend this novel and after you
read it is going to change the way you see love.

"Love in the Time of Cholera" touches upon different forms of love, from possessive to platonic, from passionate to unconditional. Marquez has beautifully woven every character of his book and even though some readers may identify with the two protagonists - Florentino and Fermina - most other characters are also have their "grayness," and that makes the novel more interesting in different forms.I am a psychotherapist, so I usually like to put on that lens when analyzing every character and the reason behind their behaviors and thoughts. One of the things that was very interesting, especially from an attachment point of view, was the emptiness and confusion Florentino felt after failing to marry Fermina. And in order to fill that emptiness, that hollowness, he got involved in so many relationships, which proved to be never satisfying for him. Overall, a good read.

A magnificent book by a magnificent author. One of those stories you will not soon forget and will re-read. Garcia's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" touched me in the very same way. (Yes! I'd rather be in Macondo!)

I'm saddened that this book is now a movie (as I was with "Dune," which I have never watched nor will). Seeing the story on the big screen will no doubt satisfy some and they will have no reason to read the book. Their loss, their tremendous loss. (Oprah, by the way, is promoting the movie in her own special way by choosing the book just in time for the movie's November 14, 2007, release.) I won't see this film, because the characters live in my imagination--along with Garcia's amazing words. In fact, I'll begin re-reading "Love in the Time of Cholera" as soon as I log off here.

After reading "One Hundred Years Of Solitude" last year and not being dazzled, I decided to read this book to try to get a better feel for the author. I enjoyed the love story - and I truly felt "Love In The Time Of Cholera" was more about a love story than about a commentary about love in general. Just the way I read it. The premise wasn't original, but the idea of lovers being potentially being re-united after a long separation is always a good one.

I did enjoy the prose of Garcia Marquez much more in this novel. Descriptions flowed nicely, though the story did get tedious at times. However, at times I found the story to be funny or sweet or touching. However, I was disturbed that Garcia Marquez would describe a liaison between the 70-something Florentino Ariza and his 12 - 14 year old ward. That was more than tough to handle for me, and I find it interesting that most can ignore this.

Oh well. Overall, a good, interesting story and I will look forward to the movie later this year.

This book is a beauty, intricate and deliberate, tied together through strands of pathos, humor, and lush description. From the opening scenes where Dr. Urbino dies (hilariously) by trying to capture a pet parrot, and ends with his dying words to Fermina - "only god knows how much I loved you" - you can see what sort of book this will be. Marquez is master of the deeply nuanced tone; in addition to the touching depictions reviewers have described, it is also incredibly, gently funny, horrifying, and mysterious.

Set to the scope of 50+ years, Marquez could have easily wavered in his execution. It's not often you see characters followed for the duration of their lives, much less a love story that involve a recounting of an entire marriage. But the characters unfold wonderfully, and the entire picture you're given of them is very rewarding by the end of the book.

Yes, this book is dense, and it will demand a lot of you. This does not, in any way, shape, or form, make it a bad book, and honestly: if you think as much, YOU are the bad reader. If you think the measure of a good book is a tight, streamlined plot, you are missing out on centuries of fantastic writing. If you are unable to see the characters of Fermina, Juvenal, and Florentino in their complexity and despise them for any one quality, you are reading the book selectively. Florentino, in particular, has a brilliant portrayal; he is at once all of the things people accuse him of: the annoying adolescent crybaby, the "shadow of a man" Fermina says he is, and the noble, faithful lover of all time. Many people will disagree with his particular brand of "love" -- given how drenched we are in cliched self-help regarding the subject -- but even if you disagree with him and what he stands for, he is, in some ways, undeniable. Marquez reveals moments of all the characters which call for critique and moments where their point of view is justified. In short, if you're unable to read a book with any kind of complexity, please move on to Danielle Steele, and leave the rewards of Cholera to those of us who are willing to give it time and thought.

The movie is really only worth watching if you've read the book. Without the complexity, it's not even a shell of the book (which it parrots faithfully but does not capture AT ALL), even with Javier Bardem, who is emphatically amazing, as Florentino. But it manages to capture (sometimes unwittingly) a lot of the really funny moments, and small portions of it are an interesting interpretation.

Briefly put, _Love in the Time of Cholera_ follows the interconnected lives of three characters over a period of fifty-odd years: Florentino Ariza, the illegitemate son of a shipping magnate, Fermina Daza, the woman with whom he is obsessed, and Juvenal Urbino, the doctor for whom she rejects Florentino.
It seems a little presumptuous of me to rate a book by a Nobel Prize winning writer, but in all honesty I didn't like this book very much. It struck me as less a story than an OPUS. Although the writing is very, very good, full of rich detail about Central American life at the turn of the last century, I couldn't really relate to the characters or their situations. They seemed inhuman and statue-like, devoid of intelligible emotion and motivation. The style of the narrative also was very difficult to me, as it went on in an almost stream of consciousness manner, jumping from one character to another, from sex to fashion to dentures to revolution in a way that made my head swim. There were very few breaks or natural stopping places and after the first hundred or so pages I got the unpleasant sensation, reading it, that I was trapped in a room with a meandering speaker who wouldn't shut up. All in all, I couldn't relate and I found the characters pathetic. I wanted to tell them all to just get a life. It seemed as though that actually happened at the end, but it wasn't soon enough for me to rejoice in the resolution. I was just glad it was over.
The writing was good, though.

This book has very little dialogue which may cause the less experienced reader to hesitate, but Marquez's incredible style will captivate any avid reader from the very start. Previous reviews have suggested that the book rambles on and leads nowhere, but they are reading this with the wrong mindset! This is not a page turner but rather a work of art that must be analyzed and dissected slowly in order to benefit fully from its contents. Marquez must be read on several different levels in order to fully appreciate what it is that he is trying to say. The whole work is an allegory of love in all of its various forms and fashions. Marquez decides to build the various forms and shapes of love around Florentino Ariza and his "crowned goddess" Fermina Daza during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Not only does Marquez weave the two lives of these characters marvelously throughout the book's 50 or so year time frame in order to critically analyze love or the appearance thereof, but he takes us back to a time and place where social norms prohibited various expressions of the types of love that he explores. The story is not just about love, but life in general and the inevitable aging process that all must go through, and about believing in something so strongly that you will spend your whole life attempting to attain it no matter the cost. This is a story of a hopeful (not hopeless by an means!) romantic who ultimately obtains what he has desired his entire life during the final chapters of his existence. Nostalgia is also a dominant theme, which goes hand in hand with love.

The only person who is really rambling here is me, so I'll close the review, give it five stars and simply say you won't regret reading this if you read it with an intelligent and open mind.

Love in the Time of Cholera (El Amor en los Tiempos del Colera) is a great book. I read it 8 years ago when a friend lend me a couple of Garcia Marquez's books, and I remember the story like if I would have read it yesterday. I can tell a lot a of things about this book because is that amazing that once you start talking about it you don't want to stop, that's why I'm leaving the details for you. Instead I'm telling you just one thing...

Love is the most powerful and beautiful feeling in the universe, and no matter what you do, if you are meant to be with someone you are going to end up with that person. You just have to believe and never give up.

Now...go and get the book!!! This is one that you want to read!

What is cholera? What does "The Time of Cholera" stand for as a literary device, and how does Cholera affect Love?
I am ignorant of love and death, but Marquez himself says of his lovers: "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."
The story begins with the smell of cyanide, bitter almonds, unrequited love. Unrequited love, like cyanide or cholera, can kill BUT ONLY BY CHOICE. One may also endure and hope. (And drink plenty of fluids! Cholera toxin binds the GM1 ganglioside and makes fluids and electrolytes pour from the body. One dies excruiatingly of dehydration.)
Dehydration: Love is like water, one must stay filled with both. Why was the lover, Florentino, head of a river boat company? The river was drying up, the manatees were dying, yet he still persisted on going up river flying the flag of quarantine.
Death pervades. Death gives love permission to access magic. Through love and magic, the lover is spared death. Love becomes a vehicle to float one's craft above the waters in a desiccating land.
"From the moment I was born, said Florentino Ariza, I have never said anything I did not mean."
As for myself, I am the poor Dr. Juvenal Urbino, trying to cure cholera through medicine and proper sewer design, one hand on the ladder, green suspenders flapping in the air, being eyed by an evil parrot, mangoes out of reach, suspended over pavement with no hope of communion. But from the top of my ladder, I can see the riverboats, and give a final wave to salute the lovers who will soon sail upstream...and in that salute, the parrot soars free.
Bueno. There is wind in my hair.
P.S. Why has no one said how very funny is this magical work? If you doubt me, ask the parrot. He sits now atop the mango tree and takes his pick. He is Florentino Aziza with feathers.

I read somewhere that the admirers of One Hundred Years of Solitude would be surprised to know that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has bettered it in the form of Love in the Time of Cholera. Well, although I found the latter half of it a little cloggy, I was a great admirer of One Hundred Years of Solitude. But after reading Love in the Time of Cholera, I think it's not fair to compare as different works of fiction as these two novels are, and it won't do any good to GGM as well.
The only thing common to these two novels, however, is the prose of GGM. He weaves, with the dexterity of a master craftsman, small characters and trifle incidents into the vast fabric of his novels. Effortlessly moving from character to character and incident to incident, he provides small pegs and footholds to the reader so that he could ascend, like a rock-climber, to GGM's colossal literary monuments. This is especially true for Love in the Time of Cholera, where the reader is provided with a spectacular finale and one feels indeed like setting foot at the summit of Mount Everest after reading the novel. This is by far the best ending of a novel that I have read so far.
There are dozens of important characters in Love in the Time of Cholera but I think the two most important protagonists are Love and Time. And both of them are so intricately interwoven together that sometimes it becomes difficult to tell which is which -- like two shrubs that run up the length of a tall tropical tree. The love of Florentino Ariza, a thin and shy boy, for the beautiful but whimsical Fermina Daza is unlike any in literature. And in order to have her, our hero must overcome time (half a century!), her aloofness and more than 400 love affairs! I guess even Hercules would have given up in face of these obstacles.
Unlike many other great writers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has little inhibitions. He is not ashamed of hiding emotions or sugarcoating his ideas; he simply does not believe in euphemisms. You can see everything in bare, harsh light: scars, warts, blemishes, all. Reminds one of . . . Life.

This is a warning. This is not One Hundred Years of Solitude. Parts of this book are wonderful, but Florentino Ariza, one of the main characters, is repulsive and in no way sympathetic. There are passages that are beautiful, but I found myself hoping for Florentino's untimely demise. It didn't happen. Big disappointment. But one thing that you take away from all Gabriel Garcia Marquez' novels including this one is sympathy for a country and a way of life that never will be again and probably never was.

It took me a long time to get through this book. It just didn't draw me in.
There are certainly good things that can be said about it. Its scope is impressive. The characters are well developed. There are bits of wisdom interspersed throughout. I think parts of the story will remain with me for a long time.
Reading it was just so tedious though. It's very slow moving with constant elaborate descriptions. There are very few breaks in the narrative and the story line was often untracked by digressions that I didn't find interesting. I felt like I was being buried under a never-ending deluge of words.
I don't regret reading this book but I wouldn't say I enjoyed it.

This is one of the most refreshing love stories of all time. I read it a few years ago and it is still the first book I recommend to friends and strangers. Marquez really transports the reader to a magical world where fantastic things happen all in the name of love. The imagery is other-worldly, the prose is seductive, the plot is riveting, and the characters will stay with you a long time. I think most romantic types will fall in love with this book.
I personally liked this book best out of all his other books, including 100 Years of Solitude. But if you're less romantic, and more cerebral, you may like 100 Years better. Still, both should be read because they are both two of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century.

I did not like the writing style of this book at all. I thought it was too rambling and "fruity" at times that did nothing to improve the reading experience for me. I struggled to start the book about 3 times until eventually, I took a deep breath and decided just tot go for it no matter what, bad decision. I ended up wasting about 10 days reading a book that I can truly find nothing enjoyable or fulfilling to say about. I did not like the characters, even the ones that were supposed to be likable, while cringing at the weakness of some of the characters.

This is a book that could only be enjoyed and fully understood by a hopeless romantic, of which, I am not one. I don't possess a romantic bone in my body and perhaps that is why I did not enjoy one word of this book.

At first I assumed I was struggling with the writing because it had been translated from the original Spanish but now I just don't think I liked the style or excessive length of the story. He could have cut it back a lot and made it somewhat enjoyable even to me! I only finished it as it had been mentioned by a Colombian friend of mine that very rarely suggests books, so I persevered just so I could talk about it with her.

Clearly, not a book I am going to be recommending to anyone to read but I will be taking my copy to bookgroup just in case anyone is still intrigued after reading this review. 1 out of 5 stars from me.

I will never forget this story. It is the most haunting romance I have ever read. Many readers don't agree, and I think it's because of the differences in the cultural backgrounds. To fully appreciate this novel I think you have to have experienced the culture of the people portrayed in the book. I, for the most part, felt so nostalgic towards the book because the people, the places, and the circumstances reminded me of my childhood and past loves. I know that Florentino's love for Fermina is not impossible in that world, it is even in fact the norm. So I think it helps to have that.
Otherwise, only the author's writing (which is superb, by the way), the reader's disposition, and the universal feeling of love, will help determine if you'll love this book or not.

Fermina and Florentino are portrayed in "Love in the Time of Cholera" as an eternal match of lovers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a master in his writings. Florentino is able to maintain his love for his chosen beauty throughout his life. He reluctantly accepts her marriage to another, but he continues to cherish and adore the one true first love of his life. Marquez is a true master at his descriptions of love, and sex and beauty as few authors are capable. His books are very readable, and glue the reader to the characters as if one is actually thrust into the story of his dynamic pictures. I find Marques to be the writer of some of the most compelling novels that I have ever read. I would not hesitate to recommend his books to become a portion of one's favorite library section. Dale B. Haufrect, M.D., M.A. Med DataLink, LLC

Love in the time of Cholera is about the timeless and obsessive love of Florentino Ariza for Fermina Daza who once as youth had been star-crossed lovers. However, once Fermina is taken away from his side by her social climbing father, she maintains correspondence for years with Florentino. They plan a future together that soon disintegrates once she returns and realizes her mistake in believing the infatuation to be love. Fermina Daza soon throws herself into the arms of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, with whom she lives for the majority of her life until he is tragically killed in a fall at the beginning of their elderly stage. Florentino on the other hand suffers throughout life, seeking the comfort of over 600+ women in hopes of replacing Fermina Daza. It isn't until the death of Fermina's husband Dr. Urbino that Florentino had the capacity to enter Fermina's life once again. It is a love story often times tragic, gripping and revealing! I enjoyed the book throughout although it was partially spoiled due to the fact that I saw the movie adaptation a few years ago! I recommend both the movie and book, however read the book prior to watching the movie.

I like this book. Very much. There is strong characterization, lush description, epic subject matter. I question the notion of love accepted by most readers of this book, however; I think that the broad umbrella of romantic love is invoked to explore the gamut of emotions that are often mistaken for love, but that don't quite measure up: infatuation, obsession, preoccupation, determination, guilt. Does Florentino love Fermina in truth, or is she a fiction of his imagination and a projection of what he desires? Are the choleric symptoms from which Florentino suffers real, or imagined to fill another void: the emptiness of his own life?
How can one love without contact, without conversation, without the knowing and being and sharing together that is a conventional courtship? Regardless of what the boy feels, longing letters written in a vacuum cannot constitute actual love, though it can constitute many other emotions, just as strong and just as compelling.
I would argue that Marquez feels that the relationship of Fermina and Juvenal is the example of what love actually is; perhaps in the absence of thumping hearts, the sweaty palms and sleepness nights, that brand of love is not recognized as desirable in our time or that of the book's setting. But the Urbino marriage stands as a contrast to the clinging to a desperate hope that Florentino projects. The Urbinos live, share, are annoyed, are reconciled, move on, change. They refelct the reality in sharp contrast to whatever is in the mind and heart of Florentino. The purest form of love in any relationship is the commitment, the decision to say to yourself that regardless of the wrong, regardless of the situation, I will trust and honor and respect and always be there to work with that person. Only after the passing of Dr. Urbino is there the possibility that love in its actual form can exist for Fermina and Florentino; once they can begin to share the details of life, they can begin to plum the depths of what is possible for them.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing style is indescribable: there is almost entirely no dialogue, his sentences can run on for paragraphs, and yet its some of the most beautiful language in the history of written word. It seems every translated word is carefully picked to convey to the fullest every emotion Marquez wanted in his works: I could only imagine how it would be read in Spanish by a fluent spanish speaker/reader. Some of the most gorgeous stuff ever written. I don't want to give too much away, but if you love beautiful language, well...you will be in heaven.

Although I read this book four years ago, I still think about it and recommend it to anyone I think loves great literature. Unlike many people, I do not think of it so much as a "love story" as a "life story." Today we would call the "hero" a stalker. Love is so complex and involves such an evolution to fruition, that I always felt Ariza loved his own fantasy more than anything else; but he loved it completely. And in the end, he still sought to wed fantasy and reality. More moving was the brilliance of Marquez' use of language, his craft developed to the outer reaches of art. He can play the strings of emotion like a master violinist would his instrument. No John Wayne's and Darth Vadar's here. Good guys and bad guys are one and the same. These characters are rich and three dimensional, and you'll laugh and cry at the same moment. Sometimes I could only read a paragraph or two before I would have to stop and savor the richness of this work. In the fullness of time, I will read it again.

I was a trifle disappointed in this, especially since Oprah gushed about what a great love story it was. I thought it was more a story of obsession than a love story. Plus, I have a basic aversion to reading a translation. The flow of the language is lost, and I find myself occasionally wondering if a particularly odd phrase was translated too literally. The title sounds so morbid, but the story really has nothing to do with cholera. In fact, there's a lot of humor, although it might be funnier in Spanish. My favorite part was where Florentino was writing love letters for other couples and discovered that, in one case, he was repesenting both the man and the woman and carrying on a correspondence with himself. The ending was kind of chirpy, but I guess that's appropriate since one of the main characters dies at the beginning trying to retrieve a parrot. I know, bad pun.

For readers, this is a four-star entree meal. Garcia's prose is richly seasoned. His characterization is complete and immensely human. With his style of writing, he creates for the reader a prose that is complex, ornate, baroque, and deeply satisfying.
The novel's scope ranges over the youth and old age of three characters, caught in unrequited love, surviving civil wars, deforestation of landscapes--both psychological and also natural--and outbreaks of cholera. Behind this hubris, Garcia details the fine distinctions of love and love lost.
This novel, finally, gets better when you finish reading it; the sensual prose seeps into the reader's memory and makes for a haunting, echoing satisfaction. Yes, the ending is fulfilling. In fact, the last 50 pages of the book are simply incredible, but of course, the readers needs to read everything prior to this--as set-up--to get the reward of the finale.
This is an incredibly satisfying novel.

'Love in the Time of Cholera' is one of the most unique books I've ever read. It's not quite what I expected. When I first started reading, I was expecting a love story and the start was a bit 'off' for me. But then I kept on reading. After about 50 pages, the love story began.

I'm kind of torn in my review here, the love story is good, but the oddities were a bit much. I found I kept on reading just to see how the story ended more out of curiosity than anything else.

One thing I really liked what that Gabriel García Márquez writes the story like poetry at some parts. It was beautiful to read some passages.

The story of passionate love without limits of time, distances or age. Crowned by the City of Cartagena and framed by the Magdalena River, it depicts the patient wait, although by no means celibate, of Florentino Ariza, for his beloved woman, Fermina Daza. She had married another man. His wait, as long and crooked as the river, prepares his reappearance in the life of this old but young-hearted woman. We do not care how long because the intensity and beauty of their love make minutes, or hours, or days, or years, no matter which, barely sufficient. The translation, except for the title, is superb. Cholera is for the infectious disease not for the attitude.

This book was awful. I kept reading it because I hoped to find some glimmer of all the praise it received. Unfortunately I just got more annoyed and hated each character a little more with each chapter. I am still mystified that Oprah called it a love story at all and the “one of the greatest love stories I have ever read” downright ridiculous. Essentially it is the story of unrequited love/stalking by Florentino Ariza of a beautiful, stubborn/selfish girl, Fermina Daza. He sees her and is instantly obsessed. They write each other letters and get engaged via written correspondence. Then when Fermina Daza finally sees him in person again she deserts him. She doesn’t actually speak to him or let him know she’s done. He pines endlessly. She then meets Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who she also dislikes but eventually marries him. Florentino Ariza’s story only continues to get more annoying as he lives for “love” having sex with any female he encounters, after being “raped” by a stranger on a ship. I don’t write that term lightly, it’s his terminology but so completely unbelievable and unrealistic.
I don’t know where to start with all the aspects of this book I disliked. Beyond the annoying horrible characters, the story meanders. The author goes on about details that are completely unrelated to the main story. Reading it was much like talking to a five year old who constantly changes the topic and babbles on about useless details. I don’t know why every character is referred to by his/her first and last name every time. And the term “love” is used so much in this book. It seemed like that was a way to justify anything the characters did. I know it’s not eloquent but the thought that kept going through my head while reading this book is “stupid.”

this truly was a beautifully written masterpiece. if you are into quick reads this is not for you, it took me...a month to read this (on and off)...but it was worth it. reading this book makes you feel like you are stepping into a different world. i could smell the cafe con leche, feel the humidity, see the aged buildings and cobblestone roads. when fermina daza cries i cried, the mark of a good book, is when you're able to feel all the emotions of the characters. it was an amazing story, and i believe that the ending, the very last page, is one of the greatest endings ever written. marquez successfully tells a story of half a century, in perfect pace, and captures the very essence of love. in a word ..it's breathtaking

You always know when your reading an Orpha Wenfrey book that you are going to get some of the highest quality books money can by. Love in the Time of the Colera became a classic even before she wrote it and its easy to see why because it is beautiful. Most books about love are more kind of about romance and being more "in love" than being about your whole life, this book is about your whole life, and loving it. I mean Orphap Wenfrey's life. Kind of slow in the beginning, though.

Throw out all your preconditioned notions about love. Disregard Hollywood's fictional depiction of love being all fun and no work. Ignore the assumption that there is someone out there for you who is your perfect mate and you cannot rest until you find him or her. Put aside all your ideas about love being the most pure, romantic and definite feeling. Forget about happily ever after. Welcome to reality; welcome to Love in the Time of Cholera.
This novel takes place at the turn of the twentieth century in a small town in Colombia. It is about a quest for love for two people never meant to experience it. One tries to find it anywhere in her life, whether it be with her family or her husband. And the other making it his lifelong mission to entertain the hope that he will be with his first love before he dies. The setting and time that this novel takes place creates an excellent background for a love story. In this small town where the walls do talk, and nothing you do is in secret, a forbidden love is unheard of. Everyone knows everything, and you have to be prepared to be held responsible for your actions by everyone you know. In a place where gossip is more dangerous than confrontations, love is not what it seems but what everyone pretends it is.
Though disquieting at times, this novel stretches the readers views on what love really means by taking it to every extreme. It explores every crevice in the human heart that love can sink into and make itself a home. At first, I rejected the associations that the
characters made with love. It is hard for me to comprehend the connections made with love between a pimp and his prostitute, or a corrupt father and his daughter. I did not see how infatuation with a married woman or marriage without feelings for each other, could all fit under the heading of love. They did not fit into my criteria for what I thought love was, and whom it should be shared by. By the end of the novel I realized that there are many more definitions and characteristics of what love is than I would ever get to experience.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a greatly celebrated author, makes unusual but
fascinating connections between love and death. During the cholera epidemic there was sickness and death, hopelessness and loneliness. He incorporates all the feelings of that environment into his story. Because of this, the novel has the reader's emotion bordering on hope and hopelessness, acceptance and rejection, love and hate, lucidity and insanity,
to the point where differentiating between them seems almost impossible.
You get to know the characters intimately. Recognizing the different situations and or predicaments each character is faced with helps to understand their actions and feelings. You learn about their fears, and also their motivations. Such as the revered Dr. Urbino, who convinces himself he is young by keeping the same routine and appearance from when he was twenty-five. His wife Fermina is not much better, having to convince herself that the life she chose was the one she actually wanted. And then of course there is her forever suitor, Florentino, whose only reason for living is to love. The reader is invited to take a peek into each of the characters' minds. A little bit of their history, their dreams and their reality is revealed by doing so. But only enough information is given. There is still more than enough room for readers to explore their own ideas on what is going on. Understanding who the characters are is a big part of this book. And aside from making it more interesting, it makes the story more personal and relatable to the reader. It is encouraging for the reader to know, whether they are a hopeless romantic or a cynic, that there are worse predicaments that love could have caused for them. It is also refreshing to see that there is always hope for things to get better.
It's in the title, this is a love story, but not like any you've ever heard before.

If I'm asked (I'm sure, none wiill ever do that though!) to name three books by Gabo that I consider his best, I will name "Of Love and Other Demons", "Love in the Time of Cholera" and his short story collection, "Strange Pilgrims". Yes, I know I didn't mention his most-quoted book, "One Hundred Years of Solitude"; but then I'm just an average reader devoid of any intellectual capacity or obligations, and so, I'm at my free will to choose which books I like.

What I found most fascinating about this book is the presence of Florentino Ariza (the central character of this book) and his infinite capacity for illusion -- in many of us. Perhaps the best indication of a book's universal appeal is how many people identify with it's character(s); Love--Cholera does it successfully. (Of course, Camus' "The Stranger" seems to make everyone who reads it, identify with the central character, but Love--Cholera perhaps comes very near it.) For example, many of us, once faced with a doomed love, always hope in the depth of our heart to marry the woman we loved and lost, after she becomes a widow. Some of us actually fervently hope that her husband would die! I had quite a few friends, who never read "Love in the time of cholera", and who had this dream in their heart. I myself had such a feeling for quite sometime until I read this book, and then I found out that even our hero, Florentino Ariza (Gabo?, carries the same dream in him.

This book's principal theme in naivity. Ariza, in his naive frame of mind, decides to remain a virgin until he marries Fermina Daza. But then life takes over and he ends up sleeping with 622 (Do I remember this figure correctly after 7 years?) women, and yet when he finally conquers Fermina, he lies to her telling that he had all along maintained his virginity for her.

And then Gabo brings back his omnipresent theme: love and its power. Ariza wins, and so many of us who lost, feel contended that love conquers everything. I sincerely wish, it did! But then "the only difference between life and fiction is that fiction has to make sense".

After reading Gabo's article "Serenade" in The New Yorker(?) I came to know that actually the story of "Love in the Time of Cholera" is the love story of Gabo's parents. If one wants to read about this in detail, one should read Gabo's autobiography (or is it auto-magicrealism-graphy?)"Living to tell the tale".

I stop with the hope that one day "love will be real" and it will have victory over everything.

This novel is in my all-time top ten. Others in that category include Madame Bovary, Great Expectations, The Red Badge of Courage, Anna Karenina, Miss Lonelyhearts, Life: A User's Manual, The Power and the Glory, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Falconer. So you may judge my judgment accordingly.

Even with the strongest of authors, the question sometimes arises whether the writing is so dazzling that it's possible to overlook the obvious flaws of a novel. Is the grandeur and epic sweep of _Gone with the Wind_ enough to allow us to downplay its disgusting and unabashed racism? Are Conrad's sentences so beautiful and telling that we can pretend to not notice that the second half of _Lord Jim_ reads like a clumsy recycling of _Heart of Darkness_?

Questions of this sort arise with _Love in the Time of Cholera_. The writing is lush and evocative, but the author makes some really bad decisions in putting it together. Judging from the reviews, a lot of people are completely seduced by the prose style. It's not my cup of tea, but I see why someone might embrace it and I could imagine admiring a different book by same author.

The flaws I see in this book are as follows:

First, it's not that well put together. It clearly shows signs of being a project that was put aside and taken up again later for another purpose. The opening starts off as a mystery about the suicide of an older man, but this is abandoned and seems to have been completely forgotten. And in that section, the tension is created in part by selectively withholding information from the reader (e.g., saying that a character read a letter and brooded on it without describing its contents), which is a quite frankly juvenile technique. Then a series of accidents happen on the same day that are implausible and oddly droll and don't fit at all in with the tenor of the rest of the novel. (Later on, the humor is integrated much more seamlessly and is genuinely funny.) After the accidents, the love story begins.

If it can be called a love story. There is in fact virtually nothing in this novel that resembles love in any mature use of the word that includes affection, concern for the person's welfare, a lack of envy at their successes, honesty, etc. Instead, there is lust, desire, possession, fantasies and the like. While I was reading the novel, this seriously bothered me, especially coupled with the way that the author comes across as a patriarchal man who thinks he knows women, but in fact doesn't understand them at all. After reflecting on the novel as I was finishing reading it, however, I realized that by approaching the novel with the understanding that it was a romance, I had misread it, thinking it a bizarre and twisted sentimental story when in fact it was intended to be a satire of some particular notions of romantic love. (Which is why the lush prose seems inconsistent with what the novel is trying to do.)

The novel seems to be a send-up of the old Hollywood cliche that the love of a good woman can make any lowlife the hero of a movie. A movie's main character is a bank robber who kills people and the screenwriter wants the audience to identify with him and not his eventual arch rival, his current (evil) partner, who is also a bank robber who kills people? No problem! Just give him a sexy girlfriend with a heart of gold.

In Love/Time/Cholera, the author seems to be ridiculing this but goes way too far in turning the apparent hero of the novel into a complete monster. All along, he gives indications that these characters aren't really likeable: he gives them foibles that seem calculated to make them seem insensitive and irritating (even the central husband and wife couple, who do have their charm). But then, toward the end, as the novel approaches its `romantic' climax, the author casually starts adding more details about the main character that make him reprehensible and overdoes it to the point of bad taste. After having read hundreds of pages of building the fellow up as something like a dorky cross between Jay Gatsy and Gabriel Oak (who waited for decades for a woman who spurned him in Hardy's _Far From the Madding Crowd_), you feel like the author is punching you in the face to see how much it takes for you to give up on this guy. As someone sensitive to misogyny in fiction, that the man lies to the 600+ women he has affairs with was enough for me. If I enjoyed the writing style, I might have held out until I discovered that he doesn't care to use protection or that a number of these affairs, so-called, are in fact rapes. But no matter how hypnotized I was, I think I'd cotton on to the fellow's dark side after finding out that he is responsible for at least two deaths. But, honestly, I could have led a long and happy life without ever reading a description of how a pederast talks a innocent girl out of her clothes. I got the memo long before that. Even a slime ball can experience love. Romantic love can be like a physical disease like cholera. Points taken.

In reading the reviews, I see that a number of people do in fact read this novel as romantic to the bitter end. They have to ignore an awful lot of this novel to cling to that notion. The reason that I think that readers are willing to do that is this is one of the rare novels that takes the desires of people over seventy seriously, that it appears to be granting the characters a dignity across the entire life cycle.

Let me first start off by being blunt- this book is sick. Some of the things in this book absolutly astound me- and yet I can't really disregard this book. It is ridiculously disturbing, yet at the same time it tells the tale of obessesive and unrequited love in such a realistic manner its creepy- and slightly appaling.

Florentino, the main character of this book has little to recommend him- he's a classic antihero. Neither good looking, or with any particular talents (other then picking up girls, and lovemaking... eck), it is extremely hard to like or symbathize with this character. In fact, I didn't really like this character, but he was so intersting and so real, that I stuck with the book- which in a twisted way I'm glad I did.

Basically Florentino falls in love with the "crowned goddess" Ferminia Daza, yet she rejects him and marrys another richer man. Florentino then whiles away his time, moving up in the Riverboat Carriabian Company where he works, and having a lot of affairs- 625 to be exact, while waiting for Ferminia Daza's husband to die. This story is less about love then it is about obssession, and it could be in Marquez's way to explore human emotions in a slightly sardonic matter. While the story is told with the author writing with a poker face- it is almost bland- it reveals so much about this flawed character, so as to be more of an exploration of human nature.

I can't necessarily say this book was enjoyable, but it was certantly thought provoking. While at times, I found it becoming tedious, and dragging on forever, it was also very intriguing, and no matter how disgusted you were with any of the characters, you found yourself wanting to read more about them. They were real- they were full, flawed human beings. I think this book does what all books should do, and makes the reader think. It doesn't sugar coat but shows you different examples of human character and let you decide for yourself. I would recommend this book not so much as a good novel, but as one that makes you react. While you might not necessarly like the final destination, this book is definatly worth the journey.

Admittedly, this may not be the best of Garcia Marquez, but considering the fact that the man is a genius (I dare you to find a single adverb in any of his books), his "not the best" still stands head and shoulders above most of what you will read in your lifetime.

The novel certainly has its flaws. On the first page you are drawn into an enigmatic suicide which is dropped without resolution and never brought up again. It is not like Garcia Marquez to leave a whole plot line unfinished. But there you have it, as obvious as a boil on the end of your nose; you are indeed left hanging.

The other main flaw is that Florentino is not an admirable character. He may have waited a lifetime for his one true love (and proclaimed himself a virgin after sleeping with, how many women?), but most of us will instantly stop feeling any kind of sympathy for him when he seduces a child. That is called "rape" by anybody's standards.

Where Garcia Marquez went wrong was mixing too much truth with fiction. Whenever a novelist directly bases his characters on actual people (his parents in this case) he is shackled by reality. You could say that novelists always portray reality, in an idealized manner. But mixing the two seldom works. In this case, it is the downfall of this book to have made the attempt.

By the same token, basing his characters on real people also produces the book's most shining moments. Garcia Marquez' description of Fermina as a glorified servant to a "perfect husband" who never picks up his socks is right on the money. By the end of her marriage Fermina has no idea who she is. I do not think you will find a more scathing, tender, contradictory, humorous and completely realistic portrait of a long-term marriage anywhere. This is what makes this book brilliant, and what makes Garcia Marquez such a fabulous writer. He portrays South American life with total honesty (and for this he is called a "magical realist"), yet with the compassion of a saint.

Many of our greatest masterpieces are flawed - Michelangelo's Pieta features a Mary younger than her martyred son, Manet's Olympia has a hand like a dead fish, and so on (I could go on forever) - but they are still masterpieces, and they are still beloved. This book falls into that category. It might have been better, but in its present form it contains so many poetic, magnificent and haunting truths that one has no other choice but to take it on its own terms.

Love in the Time of Cholera is an excellent novel, but not like any other love story you'll read. It explores the human emotions tied to love and the suffering some people must go through in order to be with their true love. It also shows the struggles people have with aging and the effects time has on love.

In this novel, the main character Florentino Ariza must wait for the woman he loves, Fermina Daza, for over a half a century. He spends the entire novel waiting for her while she is married to another man, and he has numerous affairs during the time he spends waiting for her. It focuses on the suffering caused by his love for her and the ways he tries to hide his love, mainly by the many affairs he has with other women. It shows the transformation from an immature, childlike love to a mature love of an older age. The characters in the novel also struggle with the idea that there is a point when you become too old to love. Florentino must battle against this theory that is had by others and show Fermina that it's never too late for love.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is very descriptive in his writing and uses phrases that let the reader easily visualize what is taking place. The reader gets a close view at the characters and because of the omniscient narration, they can find out what is happening in the minds of the novel's main characters. The reader should find it easy to relate to the characters and sympathize with them when they fall on hard times. This novel was extremely well written, and I found it extremely entertaining, a novel that I could not put down once I began reading.

This is one of my favorites by Garcia Marquez and has his magical surreal style. It is a love story in which the main characters meet in their youth, and finally come together when they are old. Set in the steamship era in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, probably just before antibiotics were available to treat colera.

Unrequited love. Simply put, that is what this love story is about, but this story is lost if put simply. complex and woven, taking place over 5 decades, this story enraptures the reader with the account of two men and the strong willed woman they both fall in love with, in the process taking us to a different world in a different era, namely the Caribbean at the turn of the century. If you ever wonder why Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel prize for literature in 1982, do yourself a favor, but this book.

I know, really I do, that this is a gifted author. So, it must be my simple tastes that leave me to say that this book went on and on and on . . . Really, every character was described in full detail, even characters who just weren't that important to the story. There were so many times I nearly stopped reading. So many. The story is, of course, lovely and tragic and all. I just found myself saying, "Please don't tell me all about the uncle. Oh, no!! Not again. This is too much information!" Then, there was some disturbing pedophilia that maybe wasn't supposed to bother me? So, I finished it. There.

It's obvious that Garcia loves his characters. And he wants to make sure you do, as well. He conveys everything down to the most inessential details. You certainly understand the humanness of each of his participants in life, their motivations, their follies, they misunderstanding even of themselves. Human frailty seems to be the ribbon that keeps all the characters tied together.

This is perhaps the third of his books that I've read, but it was the longest. There were points when I wished he would get to the point, that he would have decided not to include more events and details that were clearly not necessary to the narrative as a whole. At times, I would take a page count to see how much more I had to read to finish. That's a rarity for me. I tend to want really good works to continue. I was ready for this to end far before it was ready to wrap. As another reviewer remarked, I also was not invested in the final result, knowing it could have gone one of about three directions and also knowing that I didn't really care which.

That said, it is a remarkable work that clearly provides a sense of history, of place, of the effect of human action on the environment and on each other. I would have given this 3 1/2 stars if that option was available.

I'll just say it -- the first 40 pages are a challenge. I know I was getting used to the translated version of the author's tempo and way of unfurling a story, but I didn't catch on too strongly on what I should be carefully remembering and what was window dressing. However, upon further reflection, the beginning is simply that: a start to a sprawling tale full of benign moments, intense revelations, and industrious relationship building.

The story of love is unbelievable and awe-inspiring at the same time. The book is duplicitous, throughout, even the title. I loved it, though, and finished it at a local cafe, while listening to the gorgeous soundtrack from the movie.

While enjoying the great ideas presented in this book, I cannot say that I actually much enjoyed the novel itself. Contrasting with most other reviews, the primary theme of this novel is illusion vs reality. The love in this novel is primarily illusion...which is shown by the obsessive love of Florintino. Again, illusion is shown through the entire character of Florintino, with his 622 affairs is a completely unbelievable character. This illusion causes Florintino to decrepitate and to always appear old. THis causes as parallel with Florintino and the land, which is also decrepetating. Eventually, Fermina is able to see thorugh this illusion and see reality....like Urbino is able to see the reality of the land. Several types of love are presented in this story, and it is very difficult to tell which is true love. It is arguable that there is no example of true love between two people in this story....and that the only example of true love and freedom is what Fermina felt at the end of the novel. It is also arguable that Florintino never really loves Fermina, but simply loves the dream of perfection that he created with her (which is evident when he plays the Crowned Goddess at the end). There are several other great ideas that Marquez adds to the story to support these themes. Overall, the novel was interesting, but slightly less than enjoyable. I felt that the overwelming detail often hurt the novel, as the explicit scenes of Florintino and the other women. Even though this fit with the novel, as did the disgusting references to cholera, it did not make for the most pleasent read in the world if you're simply looking to read for enjoyment. Nether-the-less, one must respect Marquez's themes, which are quite advanced.

I have just finished this novel. As I came towards the end, I had to ration the pages I read since I did not want to leave that world and the protagonists. I found the book extremely moving in its final phase, on the boat, when FA and FD are finally together: it must in part have been the structure of the book that enabled it to have such power in this phase. The long first chapter was a brilliant tour de force and could have stood alone but for the advent of FA at the end. We then go on a detailed ride through the past fifty years or so, allowing us to understand what brought FA and FD to that point. The book remained compelling throughout on account of the vivacity of the writing, the humanity and humor of the writer, and the brilliance of observation after observation. The only thing that jarred me was the age of FA's ward when he began an affair with her--14. I also found the ending difficult---right at the last. It didn't work well for me. It seemed to be ducking away from reality in a way that did not conform to the rest of the novel. These were the only things I experienced as flaws on first reading. Generally I simply reveled in and marveled at the material on page after page. Recommended without reservation.

"Love in the Time of Cholera" is a beautiful, character-driven novel. Gabriel Garcia Marquez moves slowly in the beginning, establishing place and characters with histories for each. Clearly he loves the people he's creating. I felt that I was experiencing a slice of life in a culture and era quite different from the ones I've inhabited. In the course of the book, the characters love and betray each other, but ultimately the book offers a positive understanding of the strength of love in spite of obstacles.

This story is tragically beautiful and Gabriel García Marquez is a master at creating flawless prose. After young love is broken apart by a well meaning father trying to protect his daughter's status, her starry-eyed suitor pines over her for half a century. Meanwhile, she marries, and he goes on to have numerous lovers in an attempt to fill the void she left but doesn't let any of them penetrate him emotionally. When her husband dies, he returns to declare his love for her.

Throughout "Love in the Time of Cholera" I was reminded that a decision made by one person doesn't just affect that person, it rockets off in all directions and inflicts many. The story gives one hope that love is timeless--probably less so in real life. It's almost too much to believe that reuniting after 50 years makes up for all the pain and agony of missing your one true love. Gabriel García Marquez's literature is a pleasure to read and in the most perfect form. "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" is another one of his that is a must read.

If you (like me) aren't a big fan of romance (the written, not real), this is the romance for you. Marquez beautifully wraps true love in reality. There are no tawdry soliloquies that make you think if the characters were in the real world they would fall to pieces from emotional convulsions. Marquez shows that un-requited love can be stored like a special memory. You can grow and love and Live, without being destroyed by what you don't have. But, it's not so true as to tarnish what love and adoration are. This is a fabulously, bizarrly, extrordinarily written book. It's a love story that will make you feel uplifted; not weepy.

I was left awed, shocked, disgusted, amused, inspired and mostly bewildered by this amazing tale. Florentino is a hopeless romantic who waits almost half a century for his true love. This story also chronicles the married life of his love- Fermina with Dr Urbino, in addition to Florentino's numerous love affairs. The prose is so engrossing and rich that at times it captivates the readers, but it also requires a slow down at times ,in order to grasp the essence. This novel is a translation from Spanish and still retains its true flavor, thereby making it even more remarkable.This book cannot just be taken in a literal sense, there is more to it than what appears on the surface. Garcia's ability to use magical realism (by treating love as a disease) with immense effect definitely makes him one of the best writers of this era.

GGM truly captures the spirit of love as he weaves a love story spanning over 5 decades. Florentino pines for and waits for reciprocity in his never-diminishing love for Fermina Daza. In fact, his love for Fermina grows over the years as he follows her life, albeit from a distance, with the firm conviction that in the end she will come to him.
A truly classic book with the moral 'if you love someone let them go. If they return, they are yours. If they don't, they never were'.
Unlike other books which are translated (this one is translated from Spanish), the ideas and the meanings which the author wishes to convey does not get lost in the translation....
A must read.

Intricate imagery, lush description, and well-rounded characters. Love is a study on aging, sexuality, death, and the corruption of society which is what "cholera" is a metaphor for. Many argue about whether this book is a modernist or postmodernist novel because Gabriel Garcia Marquez places the characters amidst a postmodern world, but in the end they are still retaining their emotions and hope.
A worthy read for any well-read individual.

This is probably my favorite of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works. In this book he is able to map out his charactors with idiosyncratic humor and a poignancy. Somehow every detail, no matter how unrealistic, seems possible. when you read this book, think about the differences between how people are perceived and how they really are. Also, think about the differences between our (people) ideals and fantasies, and the realities of our world. just a thought.

One may have to be a fan to truly enjoy this book, or one may just hav to be old enough to remember all the things love can be. A loveless marriage that is truly based in love is hard for most to understand, and the flavor of another culture can be disarming, even deceptive at times. All in all, I have been a fan and had a relationship of my own for 46 years so the poignancy of the flash back, though a different tie period than my own, still reaches in to touch a special memory.
E. Claverie, editor, "Forget the Cures, Find the Cause, Books I and II"

I had wanted to read this book for a long time, but when I finally checked it out of the library, I put off reading it. At the time I was reading a very long, 600+ page book, and I when I finally started reading Love in the time of Cholera, I was put off by its beginning, which to me seemed to have no point. However, I kept at it, and soon I was hooked.
The story occurs over a 50 year period, starting at the end and then going back to beginning to explain how things got there. In the late 1800's, in an unspecialized South American city, a boy and girl fall in love. However, their love is never consumated, and they barely speak, choosing instead to correspond with letters. Finally the girl chooses to marry a rich doctor- but the boy never gives up, waiting for the day Fermenia's husband will die. The author's style kept me going, as his writing style helped me imagine the story perfectly and beatifully. I loved this book!

I tried and tried and tried and tried to finish this book, and finally did, THREE MONTHS LATER, and I read Moby Dick in 48 hours (college assignment, 48 hours, no sleep, even read it in the tub). I am not a slow reader.
There just wasn't enough to keep you interested in this story, and not even any chapters to give you a good stopping point. Every time I picked up the book to read, which was almost every night in bed, I would have to re-read the last four or five pages just to remember what was going on. Does someone really pine away for a woman for 50 years? Especially some nerdy little pervert who's had dozens and dozens of lovers in his lifetime. Surely at least ONE of these other women would have had a precious golden vagina that could spark his interest long enough to make him forget all about Fermina Daza. And don't even get me started on the names. Does the author have to call everyone in the book by their first AND last name EVERY TIME he mentions them. It was maddening. Once you've read 300 pages, you already know their last names.
I wanted to like this book. I really did. I tried for three months to like it. And it's a testament enough to the author's writing skill that I will still give it three stars. I've even kept this book out on my nightstand since then to see every day, thinking that I may give it another chance. And six months later, it's still there. Maybe someday.

Among the FEW reviewers who did NOT like this book I noticed the content was their problem - all those affairs this fellow had while hoping and waiting for his true love until her husband died and they were both tottering into their 70's. But whether youth or OLD age Garcia Marquez WRITES ! His prose is like a painting where every square inch glows with exotic color and every juktaposition surprises you: descriptions turned inside out. No, I did not like the leud parts - I suppose it sells - but this book is alive with poetry of the soul, with poetry of human experince. I read it over and over. I have no time to read, but this one has become as essential as a good meal.

What Gabriel Garcia Marquez does best, where most fail, is he lets his readers think. I had forgotten how to do that after reading years-worth of feed-it-to-me novels. As a result, I spent the first half of this book hating it. Yes, I am one of those folks that don't give up on a book just because I don't enjoy the first 99% of it, regardless of how long it takes me to finally get through it. I read on steadily with faith that it will eventually impress, and although I am sadly disappointed when this doesn't happen, Love in the Time of Cholera was THE ONE, the one that did finally capture me. Gabriel Garcia Marquez continues to hold a spot on my list of favorites.

When a brilliant writer has little to say and gets paid by the word, this is the kind of book that results. I always finish the books I start. I usually read them straight through. With this book I read three other books before finishing this one. The story is short and trite. It could be told very elegantly in 10,000 words. The rest is very well-written filler. As well-written as it is, filler is still filler and makes the reader work too hard to remain interested. I ended up not caring about either character (as they were not that interesting). I kept waiting for something interesting to happen, but it never did. I will check out some of his shorter titles. He writes brilliantly, so it may be worthwhile to read something of his where he has a story worth telling.

Note: Spoiler...don't continue if you haven't read the novel.

Like most of the reviews I enjoyed the writing and story of "Love.." until I came upon the systematic seduction of Florentino's protege. This was child molestation in any language. I thought that for this transgression Florentino would be denied his Holy Grail. I was wrong and so disappointed. Although, I often am not in moral alignment with fictional characters, this particularly offensive form of evil left a bad taste in my mouth. The victim was destroyed, but the perpetrator lived happily ever after.

Initially I did not care for this book. I found the characters elitist, shallow, and self-indulgent and my disdain for these people completely overshadowed all other reactions to this book. And then I read it again.

Love in the Time of Cholera tells the tale of the madly infatuated Florentino Ariza, the object of his desire Fermina Daza, and Fermina's emotionally logical husband, Dr. Urbino. Spanning over half a century the love, passion, rejection, desire, and heartache these characters experience is revealed in vividly, breathtaking prose. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's words completely envelope, embracing the heart and soar with the overwhelming sensation of love. The many illustrations of love, love between friends, love of animals, love intended, love impassioned, love unrequited, and eternal love realized, are the essential themes of this stirring book. The cholera plague which reappears several times throughout the tale, serves as an analogy for Florentino's love sickness and as a reminder of the thin line between passionate love and its power to create devestation.

Florentino's declaration of "everlasting love" to Fermina, fifty years after she has rejected, him introduces the complex and mysterious quality of both love and of Marquez's book. That Florentino had "six hundred twenty-two entries of long term liaisons" does not alter his belief that he has been faithful to Fermina. Fermina, realizing that her young love for Florentino was "nothing more than an illusion" learns after thirty years to love her husband. This she says "was a time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess . . . " Dr. Urbino also grows into a relaxed, though somewhat passionless, love with his wife. In the conclusion of the book as the flag of cholera is raised so that Florentino and Fermina can live out their final days together, wistfully suggests that love indeed may be undying.

It is easy to be offended by the unbelievable number of affairs Florentino engages in, especially the affair with the fourteen-year-old America Vicuna. It is easy to dismiss the eventual comfortable love between Fermina and Dr. Urbino as an all too familiar tale of settling in love. It is easy to dislike the characters because of their racism, self-involvement and their aloofness. What is not easy to ignore is the passion this book generates through words that summon the sensations and beauty of the spirit of love.

I’ve always have difficulties when writing about Love in the Time of Cholera. Not because of the novel’s explicit motifs, but due to the way many individuals (who I suspect might not be familiar with certain aspects of Caribbean, Latin, Hispanic… culture) tend to react to the story.

There is graphic sex… and many inappropriate relationships as well. So much of it, that if the reader isn’t careful, the bare-butts and gasping breasts will fill his or her brain with shadows. And those shades of lust and debauchery tend to veil the real story: the lives of a group of people who barely exist while they are being watched by society, for their realities are spent in their heads and hearts and in rooms stinking of sweat, self-hatred, and deception that tries to pass for tradition, faith and decorum.

Gabriel García Márquez writes beautiful, intelligent prose about horrible realities; and Love in the Time of Cholera is an example of just that. Reading this novel without keeping in mind that it describes a time, place and culture different from our current lives (let’s hope!), can be rather problematic… even scary. This is my third time reading this book, and I still wince when I read sections I already knew were there.

I recommend Love in the Time of Cholera in the same way I recommend the Bible to friends who say that they haven’t read it because it makes them uncomfortable and they don’t believe in it. Well, some of the reading makes me uneasy, too, but exploring the content might be one of the first steps towards understanding a very large group of people. I don’t know about you, but I believe knowing is way more than half the battle.

I am guessing this was translated and think it lost something in the translation. Besides that it was so much about people's thoughts. I think those were my two biggest issues. Also seemed like very little action.

True, this is not the most exciting novel as far as holding your attention, but it really is beautiful. I actually tried to get through it in Spanish to see if it was really that great, or if the translation was that good. Couldn't quite get it done en Espanol, but I loved it just the same in English. Subsequent readings have been even better as far as appreciating Marques' genius. I wish he would really write again.

First published in 1985, it's difficult to believe that "Love in the Time of Cholera" was actually written in the time of AIDS. The story hearkens back to a different era, more reminiscent of Tolstoy.

Relationships begin with curious glances and develop letter after letter after letter. The pace is excruciating. And though the character studies are intriguing -- the reader is easily able to visualize the development of Fermina Daza into a strong-willed but sagging matriarch -- it's not a traditional page-turner.

The element that will most likely stay with me when I think about this novel years from now is how much Dr. Juvenal Urbino enjoyed the smell of his urine after eating asparagus. I have to believe that much of my complaint with this book lies in the translation. On more than one occasion it seemed like it was being overwritten in the translation and not in the original text.

"Falling in love makes you vulnerable," "love makes you do crazy things," I haven't heard the end about what can be said about love, and falling in love. Most of the reviews of this book on the store.com approach this aspect of the novel Love in the times of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez as the main theme. However, a more detailed passage narrates the endeavor of Florentino Ariza, one of the main characters helping lovers with the communication processes in their relationships. He offers his services to write love letters to those who can't write them by themselves. When the recipients of those letters resource to him to write the responses to be sent to the senders, "he realizes that had been writing love letters to himself." (Can't cite the exact page on this edition, but if you buy it and read, you will find.) This is hilarious, I cannot think of a more humorous consequence of love, and everything done in its name. It is fascinating imagining the level of trust vested in Florentino Ariza by the individuals "in love" who recourse to his services and deposit on him their most private feelings and emotions they experience. Also, making him aware of the happenings of their romantic relationships is a vote choosing his trustworthiness.
The setting of this book predates the Internet for about a century; I wonder how a fictional story such as this could be tailored in the world of advanced communications of today. How the course of events might have flown if the ways we communicate mostly electronically, mostly through the distance. How this romance had transpired if placed in 2013. Would the turn out be better? Have communications improved and advanced our communications as much as communications have advanced themselves? Is it better with the Internet? If not, how can we make the Internet a better place?
Trying to figure out how to make the Internet a better place is like trying to figure out how to make the world a better place. Opinions, suggestions, and expectations might be as abundant as the phenomena in nature or geographical accidents. Our world is a place where many celebrations have taken place since human beings arrived on it. As the celebration described in this novel, our party is sometimes affected by rain, yet we still manage to celebrate, let's celebrate this book, let's celebrate its author, and let's celebrate love.
The theme of this novel, have made its way to our days, love has managed to journey through time until our days. How we experience it, how we share it with others, and how we communicate the details which nourish it, have changed along with the times, but still craziness, and crazy acts are performed in the name of Love.

Love in the time of Cholera
Gloria Fernandez
People may think of love and automatically think about the people who are close to them such as their family or they may also think about their soul mates. This is not wrong in today's society. This is what most people think about when talking about love, and this is the way they are raised to think. If you look up "love" in the dictionray the most common works used to discribe love are "deep affection" or "warm feellings". However, Love in the time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez gives us a different view on what love is. There is love for all ages, there is love for the young who is inexperience and fall foolishly in love; and then ther is the love for the old that is mature, and true. "Love in the time of cholera portrays love from the first to the one and only love.
How dramatic that the book starts with a suicide! Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a very descriptive writer to the point that he makes you feel as if you are there. You could smell the stench and see the twisted anf stiff dead body. You then wonder why this man committed suicide. Did he do it for love and if so why? To make things more dramatic, Marquez adds another death! A death that is unexpected and surprising. Which leaves a widow. However out of this death came out a declaration of love, a love that is declared to the widow that is grieving for her husband's death.
Who is this guy and is he crazy for waiting for a man to die to take his wife? Now my question is how long can a person love somebody for so long with out response? Florentino the man that declare his love to the widow has loved her for fifty-one years, nine months, and four days. It is too many years for me to love someone with out receiving the same affection. Can true love last so long? Is Florentino just obsessed over Fermina or is she some kind of fantasy or illusion.
Florentino is a very unique character. He never left his town, causing his to never grow into the person he could have been. Staying home and seeing his love being married to someone else, seeing how she develops as a mother and wife from afar. Just waiting and wishing for her husband to die to take his righfully place along side his love. Living in a life that you love but not being loved back is the world that Florentino is living and is destroying a way, but its also a keeping his alive.
In the time and place where the book takes place, is a time where certain things were forbidden. However they may have been forbidden but they are still done. To the late night visits that Florentino took to visit the widows, to Fermina hiding note from her father that Florentino has written.
"Love in the time of cholera" is a book that embraces loves and transforms it in to something beautiful. However love is not all for it is accompanied by death and pain, they all come together to. Marquez does a beautiful job in connecting them all together, he goes beyong describing them and bringing them together he brings the to life.

Mr. Garcia Marquez creates a world full of deep characters and rich experiences in this story of passion. The attention to detail really bring the story to life, but the gift of personal description in evident in the multiple lovers of Florentino Ariza. The author describes one event for the life of the character, usually a women, and her complete personality is revealed. Some of the anecdotes are humorous, but many are an ironic statement about the treatment of women and their place in society. For this reason, the book is more than a love story, it acts as a chronology of a woman's life, moving through adolescence to old age.
This would be a wonderful novel for couples to read together. There are many observations on the trials of marriage, while trying to live out the dreams and goals of an individual person. The author explores all types of love that a person can have in their lifetime. He presents difficult situations of fidelity, marital responsibility and the institution of marriage.
It is not a suspenseful story, most of the plot details are revealed early on in the story. The fantastic descriptions deserve revealing over in order to appreciate them fully, and this can become somewhat tedious. Overall "Love in the Time of Cholera" is a wonderful novel, rewarding for newcomers to the author, familiars of Gabriel Garcia Marques' works and all readers who enjoy a good love story set in an exotic location.

I have always enjoyed Marquez's work (I encountered The General in His Labyrinth in a bookstore in Guatemala and recently read his marvelous small work on aging, Memories of My Melancholy Whores), but for some reason had never read what many consider his greatest work, Love in a Time of Cholera. I have just completed it, and it is one of the finest books I have read in my 60+ years of reading. It is a complex luminous tale of unexpected magic, and the most wonderful love story in my experience. When I told my sister about it, she said she often give copies of it as wedding gifts. The book is fine literature, a marvelous story, highly creative, and deeply satisfying.

A wonderful love story. One of the things that surprised me about this book is the humor and levity in it. I wasn't expecting that, and it made it very enjoyable. But Marquez's real strength is in his description and word choice. The prose is beautiful and haunting.

Endless passion, relentless desire, for an unrequited love ~ does it really exist or can it for over half a century? Marquez most certainly can make a believer out of you in "Love in the time of Cholera". The characters in this book are so vividly animated, they enter your heart and stay long after you finish this odyssey of love that spans a lifetime.
Aside from a fantastical love story between the main character, Florentino Aziza and Fermina Daza, Marquez captures you and keeps you in his magnificent detail of life in the early twentieth century as it encircles the main plot. All the characters Marquez has created throughout are incredibly enigmatic and add to the book's allure. I wanted to dance with each of them as I pictured his characters in bright, colorful attire and roses in their hair moving to an evocative tango of love.
There is so much passion in his writing. Marquez elicits a desire so powerful between these two incredible characters that it makes you yearn to feel it yourself. The result is a splendid pageturner to the very end and leaves you with the hope of innocence in a forever love.
And so we leave off where we began... endless passion, relentless desire, undying love, does it really exist? You be the judge. Read Love in the time of Cholera today!

Love in the Time of Cholera is an emotional story of love and its hardships. Throughout the novel love is compared to things such as flowers, water, and birds. In this story, the emotion of love is so great, that it literally makes men sick.
Dr. Urbino is a very sophisticated, well-respected doctor. He is not a very emotional man. The story begins with him finding his best friend lying on the floor, after committing suicide. He is afraid of aging, so he killed himself. He usually does not feel pain for his patients, but his old chess partner was very close to him. He finds an eleven-page suicide note in which he explains that he has had an affair with a woman for about half of his life. Dr. Urbino is mad that his friend does not tell him about his lover. He has an intense desire to tell his wife, Fermina, about the letter, but he does not.
This story switches tenses often. The story now goes back to before Dr. Urbino is married.
Fermina Daza is a young women living in a Caribbean Port. She lives with her domineering father and her aunt. Her aunt acts as a motherly figure since Fermina's mother passed away when she was young. Fermina and her aunt like to go on walks together. Florentino Ariza is assigned to deliver a telegram to Fermina's house. This is where he first sees her. He falls in love with her. Fermina studies at the Academy of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin. Florentino has no opportunity to talk to Fermina, because her aunt is always with her on her walks to and from school. Florentino decides to sit on a bench and pretend to read the newspaper so that he can look at her every day. Her aunt is aware of what he is doing but does not tell Fermina. When she notices him, her aunt says that he is probably doing it because he is in love with her. Her aunt assures her that one day, he will write her a lovely letter confessing his love for her. Fermina wants this letter to be delivered. Florentino practically stalks Fermina for he is so in love with her. One day when Fermina's aunt leaves her by herself, he approaches her. He asks her to accept his letter, but he says he cannot without her father's permission. She tells him to return every afternoon and wait to approach her until she changes her seat. When she does, he gives her the letter and they continue to exchange letters of love for quite some time, until Mother Superior catches her writing a love note. She tells Fermina's father and she is sent out of the country to forget about her lover. However, they keep in touch while she is gone. When her father feels she has forgotten her lover, he brings her home. When Florentino sees her for the first time he does not recognize her. She is much more mature looking. Fermina's father has Dr. Urbino come to their house because he thinks that Fermina has cholera. Dr. Urbino falls in love with Fermina. Her father continues to set up dates and eventually they marry. They do not truly love each other when they marry, but believe that they will grow to love each other. On their honeymoon, Fermina is terrified of losing her virginity. The first night on the ship, she suffers seasickness. Urbino comforts her, and eventually convinces her to have sex. After three months, Fermina is pregnant.
While on her honeymoon, Florentino can only think of Fermina. He is sick with love. He drinks cologne and eats flowers so that he can have her scent with him. He is sent out of the country to work for his uncle. On the ship ride there, he is dragged into a room where a girl seduces him and he looses his virginity.
Fermina returns from her honeymoon and her and Urbino's relationship is very strange. Meanwhile, Florentino has turned to sex as a relief from the pain he feels for Fermina. He has 622 affairs, but still feels he is a virgin because he cannot love anyone as much as he loves Fermina. He longs to be with her, but he cannot because of her husband. He is the only thing in his way of Fermina. He is not a violent person, so he is going to wait until he dies to confess his feelings to Fermina again.
When Urbino finally dies, Florentino goes to the wake. He has waited fifty-one years, nine months, and four days for this opportunity to confess his love for Fermina once more. If you would like to know what happens to Fermina and Florentino's relationship you will have to read the book and find out!
I enjoyed this book. It was a bit difficult to read and understand, so I would recommend it to an older audience. There is a lot of switching back and forth between the past and present. Also, there are many references to sex and prostitutes. This novel depicts love in many different ways. It can be a great thing that makes one happy, or it can be an illness that literally drives one mad. Love also gives one's life meaning. I really enjoyed this novel.

I read this book on a hiking trip through the Appalachian Trail in New Hampshire this past summer. For those who have read it, not really the right atmosphere to read a book of such grace, mysticism and passion. On the contrary, I found myself able to entrance myself into the storyline and the language (brilliantly translated), because there were no modern day distractions out in the wilderness. I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude, but at times, found it too far reaching, spanning too much time for one novel. Granted, some feel that is the overwhelming universiality of the epic novel. Love in the time of Cholera grabs the reader, although with a slow start. You can't help but feel the emotional agony felt by the main character as he watches another man grow old with his true love. As Fermina Daza grows old, she maintains her independence, but the reader can tell something is missing from her life, and she simply flows with the motions of life, without truly living. This is truly one story that I did not wish to end. The adventures, the language, the ultimate theme of true love overcoming all obstacles; including age, multiple sexual partners, separate lives, marriage, and finally death, leaves the reader with a satisfied feeling. I highly recommend this, and constantly do, to all those who enjoy great storytelling, graceful styles of writing, and overall great literature.

I love a good love story, and Love In The Time of Cholera is an excellent one. I didn't know there was a civil war in the Caribbean during the late nineteen and early twentieth century. I also didn't know that cholera killed so many people during that time. Feelings of love and affection for another person can last forever. Any one can be lonely. Wealth influences personal decisions in this book These are three themes I found when reading this novel. Every character in this book is memorable. I identify with the romantic and patient character of Florentino the most. I love the character of Fermina too. She is loyal but very lonely. Aging and mortality is an important theme in the novel. Every character in this novel has a sense of their own mortality. The setting of the novel is so descriptive. The characters are memorable and the themes are strongly presented. I really enjoyed this book.

I stopped reading this book when I had completed 70% of it. I had wanted to stop much earlier but I am usually persistent in completing a book once I have read at least a third of it. This work by an author who received the Nobel Prize for Literature has been so highly praised that I thought I could not fail to enjoy it. It did keep my interest for the first one hundred pages but after that I sneered at its cover every time I picked it up to tackle a few more pages.

The book starts with its ending then it goes back to the beginning. The literary device of foreshadowing is carried through to the extreme: complete reveals are inserted in the narrative about what will happen years later. The story revolves around three characters, none of whom are very compelling. All three are obsessively neurotic in some form or other. Most of the pages describe a young Florentiono Ariza who falls in love with a prepubescent Fermina Daza. For years, being prohibited to build on personal contact, they exchange love letters and telegrams. When they at last meet to become engaged, she discards and shuns him--without verbal interaction--when she realizes he falls far short of fulfilling the stature he had occupied in her fantasies. The rest of his life he is possessed by worshiping her at a distance, having all the personality traits of a stalker.

Meanwhile, while she is married for fifty years to a prominent doctor, he distracts himself by having furtive relationships with over six hundred women and girls! What a pathetic individual! All those years he waits for Juvenal Urbino, Fermina Daza's husband, to die, so he can finally possess the object of his "love"! I knew this would be the outcome since it was foretold early in the book. So I thought why read another hundred pages of trivial episodes, inconsequential anecdotes and incessant descriptions of food, fashion, furniture and fauna? There is very little dialogue. There is no suspense. The plot drifts in inertia.

Whereas I had thought that I was going to enjoy a credible disciplined literary production about real-life villains and heroes (at least one), whom I could cheer on or cry for, I found instead this to be a tiresome tale of irrational characters whose improbably tortuous lives were turgidly presented by the author as stellar enigmas worthy of the highest critical dissection and analysis--when they were not. His other books are probably much better, but I am not going to read them.

please up date the binding on this book for it is a paper back .thank you

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FNSku X000P1NZ3T
Title Love in the Time of Cholera
Binding Hardcover
Publisher
Vendor Code KNOPF

Oh, the wonderful torture of time-worn love. In this masterful book, Marquez's best, he explores the nature of love and the courage it takes to pursue your soul-mate to the end of time, literally. Marquez is banging on all cylinders here, as we follow the protagonist from the earliest stages of budding adolescent desire to full-blown obsession. He cannot live without her, cannot breathe, his bowels betray him. This is serious stuff but in the magical-real world of Marquez, full of visions and rituals and eccentricities, nothing is deathly serious, even death.

It is true that a great book finds you as much as you pick it. This book was on my shelf for years before it found me at a time when I needed to find the purpose of deep love and the courage it takes to pursue it. Marquez's characters are so real that you can converse with them, yet so fanciful that you can only realize them in dreams. I read the book once for pleasure, a second time to marvel at the compact sentence structure that conveys so much and manages never to be burdensome. This is definitely in my top five and may be number one on the all time great novel list.

Very rich first chapter, detailed, engaging. First half of the book tells a worthy story of exuberant, young romantic love and the reprisal from aristocratic society. Well done. The second half prosaicly details a series of affairs and stultified chronologies of other trivia until the final ending, when of course, the lovers are reunited. The quality of the literature deteriorates until the perfunctory melodramatic ending.
This is not great literature.

In his youth, Florentino Azira was rejected by Fermina Daza at the end of a correspondence-driven affair. While she endures a marriage with a higher-class doctor, Azira continues to be faithful to Fermina, in his whimsically stubborn way that only Garcia Marquez could imagine.
While Marquez's other well-known novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is well-known for its characters who float into the air, or grow pig's tails, this book stands in decided contrast. The unbelievable happens not in the physical realm, but psychological. Here, a man has hundreds of lovers and yet remains loyal to one old, married woman. We don't ask for the psychiatrist's explanation, just like we didn't ask a scientist to explain 100 Years of Solitude. Instead, we believe and want to believe.
The details are lyrically described, different characters wind subplots around the single-minded Azira. The dialogue occurs in pithy lines scattered throughout, almost like inter-titles in old movies. Marquez doesn't move the mouths of his characters, he moves much larger forces. He moves ships, brings plagues, and stretches love over lifespans.

"Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez."
As I finished reading this book I understand many things that occur in life that sometimes people take for granted, or those little thing that we don't seem to care for or to bother with. I also realized the importance of respect and love as well. I say this in regards to the partner one chooses to be with, for example in this book I'm referring to Fermina and Dr. Juvenal Urbino, as well as Jeremiah D'Saint Amour and his mistress. Both very honest love and have respect for one another which is very important to have and understand. Another part I enjoyed very much in regards to feelings is the innocent, profound, and unconditional love that Florentino Ariza had towards Fermina Daza throughout the whole book. This is one of the books I've read that I enjoyed to the fullest.
Another different aspect presented in this book was loyalty and also in a way superstition. Loyalty was presented between the relationship of Jeremiah D'Saints Amour and his dog. That's what I meant when I said that sometimes we don't notice those little things in life that are important as well. There was also loyalty with Jeremiah D'Saint Amour and his mistress and this is because of her being with him in secret and as long as she was by his side meant keeping it a secret then she was willing to do it for love, for Jeremiah. It's amazing the love example, or should I say stories that Gabriel Garcia Marquez brought upon the characters in this novel. There was also superstition and a bit of coincidence. I'm talking about the significance of the natural world. Specifically when in the novel it rains when it was never done so in the Pentecost. Amazing how one change in our nature can also change something else in one's life?
One particular thing I liked very much was the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez described scenery or a specific area in the novel. Sometimes he would describe far to much, but as reading in a way I felt like I would read and put the words into a picture that I made in my mind and thoughts. I may sound crazy but it's the way I got through this book. In a way I understood it better by picturing it. I hope other people do it as well it's a way of understanding better sometimes. Well at lease for me it has been. Honestly his is a very good novel to read.

Humor was another aspect presented in this novel, especially when it came to Dr. Urbino with his not liking animals but he does like a parrot he has. Along with the humor came irony which was when Dr. Urbino helped the parrot from the tree but then again what happened to him not liking any animals? Ironic huh? Another very funny part in the novel was the reason when Fermina and Dr. Urbino got into an argument and stop talking for months. Funny as well as childish in a way.

I am a writer and I found myself unable to write for
at least a couple of months after reading this novel.
This man can write with such an erotic, intelligent,
and poetic manner that it can be a little overwelming
at first. This is the type of book which will linger in
your mind long after you have finished it. This book will
challenge you to embrace the beauty of language as an end,
in and of itself.

I must say that I was disappointed with this book, especially considering all of the rave reviews. The first 50-60 pages had me very interested, and then...nothing. The book jumps all over the place back and forth in time and in between characters. The more I read about Florentino, the more I realized that he is a pervert who claims to be in love. I was also extremely disturbed with the sexual relationship he has with a 14 year old girl when he is in his 70's. I found myself becoming uninterested and bored very easily. It was difficult to finish, because reading this book became a chore. I won't be recommending this book to anyone.

I do not typically read love stories. I find romantic novels to be good only for kindling, whether they be Wuthering Heights or a Harlequin romance.

Until I fell for a man who lives 4,500 miles away, I didn't believe the kind of enduring love that Marquez writes about in Love In The Time of Cholera existed. So I went looking for a well written love story more tragic than my own, and this novel provided.

I still don't like love stories, but I loved this one.

Probably my favorite book of all time. Every sentence takes your breath away. I found this title deeply moving and was completely taken with every moment of each character's life. I've read this book several times and each time ended with tears in my eyes. I found it much, much more enjoyable than 100 Years of Solitude. (No pesky family tree and back flipping necessary.

This book came as a complete surprise to me as I hated 100 Yrs of Solititude. I enjoyed his acute observations and sly asides on the nature of Human Beings, especially those on marriage. That said there was little to love about the characters but that's what makes his writing so good - he gives you the wart-and-all and so real/human descriptions. Also very good were the descriptions of what was going on in , presumabably Columbia at that time- the effect of the Banana industry and the destruction of the environment - very well documented in the last few chapters.
As others have mentioned it must be a Latin American thing to not consider adultery and grooming a child for sex a bad thing.

I'd just come off reading "Of Love & Other Demons", my first (and very satisfying) taste of Marquez, when I embarked on "Love in the Time Of Cholera." I must say that I am in the minority of reviewers here, which is to say that I was disappointed in this novel, and ultimately pulled the plug around page 150. I tried hard to keep going, but as another reviewer experienced, I found my motivational stores increasingly depleted. Finally, I threw in the towel and moved on with my life. I too found the story rather "ridiculous" (to quote Mr. New York reviewer). Plus, it moves painfully slowly, and, for me, never built and sustained drama (or, interest). I badly wanted to find this--my second dip into Marquez's work--as gratifying as my first, but finally, I couldn't force myself to pretend I was enjoying this book. Good luck should you try it. It seems that most readers were captivated by this novel. Perhaps, someday, I'll give it another try, but on second thought, I won't.

Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is not the typical love story a reader would expect to find. Marquez writes a story of many different types of loves, mostly experienced by the passionate yet sometimes perverse character, Florentino Ariza. However, one the more powerful aspects of the novel is the strength and individuality of our female protagonist, Fermina Daza, that is not always found in the women of our most ideal love stories. In this novel, the man waits for the woman who rejected him over half a century before they meet again. Fermina grows old married to a man who only learned to love her after they were married; Florentino grows old by becoming a higher person in society and living a secret sinful life with different lovers and an unacceptable sexual appetite. It goes without saying that Florentino lived his life for the love of his life while loving many others and ironically enough appearing to remain a virgin for Fermina in his own way.
Not only does Marquez write a story of love, but also a story of age that makes us ask ourselves if at a certain point, humans stop loving. Loving in the sense of having the desire for someone else. In the times of their youth, they courted only through letters and it wasn't until over half a century later that they were finally together and lived a more realistic relationship than the one they aspired for in the time of their youth.
Marquez uses such a detailed and descriptive way of the writing that once the last page is read, you find yourself wondering whether it took your breath away or if its randomness leaves you trying to put all its details together.

Love in the Time of Cholera is a simple fairy tale filled with the complexities and intrigues of life. Undergirding the book is a fantasic love story, beautiful and yet tragic at the same time. Here, the poetry of all-consuming love flourishes, but so does its insanity and sadness, its betrayal and artifice. The ambition of other-earthly love is constantly contrasted with the banality of everyday matrimony. There is love and there is cholera, yet in between these opposite poles there is old age, false expectations, and mutual misunderstanding.

Florentino Ariza, the main protagonist, is a parody of the medieval lover of romantic literature. He is the man totally devoted to love that any women would dream of, and yet just for that reason the woman he loves, Fermina Daza, rejects him as strange and weak. Florentino maintains his love, even as the woman he loves marries a more socially acceptable man, and as the city he lives in loses its unspoiled charm to the forces of modernization. Florentino is no angel, and Fermina herself is at times exceptionally ordinary. In fact, Florentino's obsession with her often seems to be a self-defeating personality disorder. Mania or not, Florentino's "love" is the most pure and enduring motivation that animates the story. In the end, Garica Marquez's satire of love is its most appropriate tribute. Whether it is a tribute to authentic "real world" love, or just the stuff of novels, I leave to your judgment to decide.

I am not the biggest fan of love stories. Saying that, let me tell you that this is one of the finest novels written, and an admittedly beautiful love story to boot. The novel is full of interesting characters, simple beauty, and fascinating locales. One need read no further than this book to understand why Garcia Marquez received the Nobel Prize, though I would suggest reading "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "The General in His Labyrinth", and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold". When I read this, I pained for Florentino Ariza; as the novel unfolds, you understand his heartache more and more. This novel has one of the most cathartic conclusions of anything I've read. Definitely a must read.

After devouring but savoring One Hundred Years of Solitude, I needed to read another work by Marquez--frankly, I immediately pushed everything else to the side of my desk and began Love in the Time of Cholera. Marquez writes in a rare, rich style, one that moves the reader slowly, for each sentence is an individual piece of beauty. When you come across a book that makes you ultimately sad for completing it, you'll know Love in the Time of Cholera. The espescially descriptive diction is enticing enough to overwhelm you, to lead you to reread Love in the Time of Cholera immediately after its final, enchanting paragraph.
A description of Love in the Time of Cholera is an impossible task, so I hope you will read the first five, ten, or three-hundred pages to understand this aesthetic baptism.
The story is much like a fairy tale based around the decision of an elegantly beautiful woman to turn down a painfully romantic poet to marry a doctor. The married couple's inner life is surrounded by wealth in a luxurious mansion, the continuing beauty from trips to Paris, and the few quarrels that almost break their relationship. Their marriage lasts through the turn of the 20th century and its technological changes--until the husband's untimely death leaves behind a widow. Surviving the surrounding destruction and awaiting his love, the poet returns.

for all those needing to believe that true love can happen, love in the time of cholera is certainly a must. such elegant prose, and lush liquid wonder. you drown in its pages, and wish that you had a real life florentino ariza. his adamantine love endured for so long that one would wonder if he was not half-insane, only to realize that when true love happens, of course one is left with no other choice but to endure. love requires nothing less than one's whole self. if otherwise, it is not love. books of this magnificence are so rare. years later from the first time i read it, i still cannot bring myself to pick up my copy and read again. the first time was so achingly beautiful--- i know it will remain unmatched. as i have learned, in love you do not look for your heart's demi-half, you look for the entire of yours.

Many times when I read, I read for content. The cover of the book doesn't matter so much, I'm not especially affected by the typeset....and that sort of thing. When I read this novel around thirteen years ago I remember being so caught up in the romance of the story.....it's a beautiful love story. But not only that, there was something extra special about reading the book itself. The subtle color of the pages and the way they were kind of rough on the edges. Lamplight making it a glowing, cozy experience. It is a really lovely book. The writing. And the book itself is pleasing, aesthetically. Somehow that seemed to make reading it an even richer experience. I would very highly recommend this novel, and I would definitely suggest the hardback edition.

This is the most beautifully written book I have ever read. It makes you want to study Spanish just so you can read the author's original words.
The story focuses around Ms. Daza and Mr. Arizo who love one another from an early age but there love is not meant to be. Ms Daza doesn't listen to her heart and marries another. Mr Arizo lives his life always thinking of her.
A great story and written incredibly.

True, this book is wordy, as some have mentioned. That, however, is part of what makes it so beautiful. I enjoy getting lots of details, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez does not fail to provide them. I simply cannot wait to get my hands on his other works.

Give this book a try. Don't get wrapped up in every word; just let yourself enjoy the beautiful narrative. If you need further proof, simply read my favorite line:

"He was the first man that Fermina Daza heard urinate. She heard him on their wedding night, while she lay prostrate with seasickness in the stateroom on the ship that was carrying them to France, and the sound of his stallion's stream seemed so potent, so replete with authority, that it increased her terror of the devastation to come."

The book is a bit repetitive in places but it is a delightful read. It spans two entire lifetimes. It takes place between the end of the 19th Century and ends in the beginning of the 20th Century. Like all Marquez novels, this one is well written and a joy to read.

Marquez's use of fantasy realism is legendary and keeps the somewhat morose plot fun and moving. The main character stalks his lover in parks pretending to read on a bench as she passes by. His love becomes an obsession.

Marquez shows that love and the sadness it can bring is not for youth alone. It celebrates the powerful hold that true love can have on a man his entire life. This is a book that a man would enjoy as much as a woman.

Highly recommended.

It took me two weeks to read this book. I can't remember the last time it took me two weeks to a read a book, probably because it has never happened. I usually read a book in a day or two, three at most. This novel has no plot. Nothing happens. While I appreciate Marquez's eloquent prose, revealing ideas and timeless characters, nothing ever happens. I kept waiting, and reading, and waiting....all the way to the end.

I hope I do not come across as a bitter cynic because I know the underlying plot is supposed to be about love, and I do believe in love. I think love can conquer all and is worth waiting for, but I did not believe that either of those characters were truly in love. Their "love" seemed juvenile and not real, even at the end.

I do not wish to discourage anyone from reading this book and would like to say that I do not regret reading it and I am glad that I did. Marquez is an exceptional writer and reading his words were a joy, except all the elements that typically make a novel were absent. I encourage everyone to read it and form their own opinion, because that is the only one that matters.

We uncover the "myths" of love, of the desperation of unrequited love, and loveless marriages. But life goes on, as these revelations are played out in South America. I don't think I'll ever put almonds in my French-style green beans again, as he feels that is the "smell" of unrequited love -- we all experience one or more in our lifetime, and yes, it does leave a bitter tasts in the rejected one's mouth, but not of almonds. It is painful to not be loved by the person you love; we don't always choose the right one, as the feeling has to be mutual.

Florentino, the Don Juan who does not sit around moping those fifty or so years while Fermina, now seventy, is made a widow when the doctor she married after she had revoked her promise to be his wife falls out of a tree while chasing his parrot. Dr. Urbino had left Fermina well off and the loveless life comes to an end. Marital love can be as mucha 'product of art' as romantic love, which is only for the young who fall in love too easily.

Both are given a second chance to recapture a meaningful relationship, after all those years of remaining faithful to her -- in his fashion. Old people marry for many reasons and most are not based on love per se. Some want companionship or a good home or security against boredom. But not Florentino, who never marries but has his way with many women. At last, his patience pays off and he has the woman of his dreams lo those many years.

This author has also written CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD and his masterpiece, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. He was born in Colombia and attended the University of Bogota. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1982. Ann Tyler calls him an "evocative" writer and a master storyteller.

The ONLY reason I give Love in the Time of Cholera more than one star is because of Marquez's writing. Which is also one of the only reasons I read it till the end.
When I got to the end however, I was so disgusted with the entire story I threw it on my bedside table a little too hard, causing it to fall on the floor, where it still remains.
I really cannot think of a better way to describe this book than disgusting. The first part of the book was beautiful, but once the the characters started to grow (physically, not emotionally), all that happened was Florentino Ariza, the man who waited fifty plus years for his childhood "love", started sleeping around. And everyone else in the book was cheating on their spouses. And then one of Ariza's many lovers stops going to bed with him because she has fallen in love with her RAPIST.
And THEN Florentino Ariza takes the virginity of a 13 year old who he's supposed to be looking after as her guardian. The scene where this is described still haunts me. He TRICKS her into taking off her clothes, playing "baby games" to make her laugh as he's doing it.
The fact that she commits suicide out of depression when he stops sleeping with her makes him lock himself in the bathroom, days later, and cry. Wonderful. Is the fact that he feels guilty about it for an hour, and then for moments every once in a while till he dies, supposed to redeem him in the readers' eyes?
Marquez even passingly writes about the fact that Ariza rapes one of his servants, which "bothered" him only in so far as he had to deal with her pregnancy.
Wtf? I feel SORRY for Marquez now that I've finished the book, because if he believes that love is what Ariza feels for Fermina Diaz, and if he thinks that life is all about sex (did i mention that pretty much EVERYONE is cheating on someone?) he's never experienced true love (not surprising if this is the trash that fills his head), AND he's never experienced life. The clean life. The life where not everyone is as disgusting as all his characters.
And, as another reviewer on here said, this could ONLY be written by a man.
I had such high hopes. I'd been wanting to find a good author and the beginning seemed so promising. I am never reading a single word written by Marquez again. I am beyond disgusted. Even forgetting the time spent reading the book, I will never be able to forget the vulgarity of the story. I cannot come up with a word with the right intensity to describe this book, all I can say is do not read it. You've been warned.

The first book I read for Marquez was 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. A magnificent feat of literary genius that transcends narrative to feel and smell like prose at many moments. Reading anything after that for the same writer will inevitably be judged and compared against that book. As I started reading love in the time of cholera my expectation has already been set and that might be one of the reasons I didnt enjoy that book as much. It is a thorough and thoughtful and at times very funny exploration of human relationships and desires. True that it doesnt have the magical feel of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' but then again what does ?

I read this book prior to reading One Hundred Years of Solitude - and perhaps that was a good thing, as I was able to see it without the influence of one of the best books I've ever read, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I loved this book. It's the reason I continued to read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It did not move me as deeply as the other book I keep mentioning, but how many times can one author write something that profound? This book should not be pushed aside because it is not the same as One Hundred Years of Solitude. In its own way, it is very powerful, and well worth reading.

I'll keep this review short and sweet, because really, this book speaks for itself. The rich imagery of Marquez brings you right into the tropical, flower scented world that this book is set in. The passion is just right for the summer, or when you feel as though you need to be reminded of it (for those of us who live in colder climates :) This is a truely amazing book that captured my heart.

For those who think of love as moonlight and roses, or are looking for a book filled with sentimental sweetness, this is not the novel for you. For those looking for a treatise on the manifold forms that love can take: passion, devotion, affection, tenderness, violence, complacency and understanding -- and how they inter-relate to the larger world of society, politics and religion, then give this a try. It is, quite simply, one of the Great 20th Century novels. It's a shame that it has been typecast as "a tale of unrequited love," because it is so very much more.

I have to say, I think Oprah and I have very different literary tastes. However, I have not read many of her selections, either.

I found Love in the Time of Cholera to be quite tedious to read. I did not care for the main character, Florentino Ariza at all and felt him to be a disgusting person. However, I stuck with it and continued, very painfully, to read this book to the end. I was hoping that as a selection of Oprah's Book Club, that it might, in the end, have some redeeming qualities. There were none. It ended just as poorly as it begun, and wasn't pleasant at all along the way.

Great book, and great read...when i started the book, the first page, well, the first paragraph just simply draws you in and then you can not put it down for nothing...
The era and the time it is set in, just takes you back into time, and remembrance of the life of people lived and lived for... living for a moment, living for love, and seeking for more from life and all it has to offer... and how society has changed from then to now..
this is a great weekend book for making that hot cup of tea, curl up on the sofa with this great vintage book...This book i have passed it on within my community for the awesome read... I would buy it again...

N. Lewis
Wilmington, North Carolina
CarpeBeachem...

This novel both condemned and redeemed itself in the main characters, namely Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. Although extremely sad, the story as a whole truly makes one think: Does love like this exist? How many people have wasted away their lives with the wrong person in order to be "safe"?

Although more dialogue would have made it an easier read, the author's beautiful and flowing descriptions kept me interested. I feel that this book is both a wake-up call/reality check and a wonderful concept for the hopeless romantic.

The book had a lot of potential and got off to an interesting start. It began as a sweet but strange love story, hit a number of slow spots, and then deteriorated into pointless perversion. While there were some endearing and poignant moments, the debauchery that the story became completely ruined this book for me. After the main character loses his chance at his "one true love" he debases himself by sleeping with hundreds of random women, ultimately to become an elderly, incestuous, child rapist. Although the author allegedly uses the novel to describe the many types of love, there is not much love but instead lust, rape, seduction, adultery, molestation, depression, and delusion. I wish I had my four days of reading back. Really not worth your time.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez crafts a brilliant novel that dissects human emotions using people from a variety of walks of life as his canvas. He paints the pages with each aspect of love, each hue a bit different and yet in a manner connected. His exploration of the depths and shallows of this emotion run the scope of experience from passion to platonic. His novel weaves itself a scientist, a poet and everyone in between. Marquez has the gifted ability to reveal life ,layer by layer, against a lush backdrop fully engaging his audience into a thoughfulness that is earned.

This book is filled with tedious unimportant details. The "love story" is flawed, and the main character is disgusting. The story is supposed to be of the great love between Fermina Daza and and Florintino Ariza who are in love as teens. Fermina goes on to marry another man. Florintino pines away for 50 years or so until Fermina's husband dies. In the meantime, Florintino has sex with anything on two legs. Florintino causes the death of one lover. He rapes and impregnates his house maid and molests a young schoolgirl who is his goddaughter. Oh, and there is endless details about his use of enemas. I think the store should have paid ME to suffer through reading this book.

I don't know how, but Oprah always knows which books will rip out our hearts, tear them up, and then give them back to us perfect and new. Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is exactly one of those stories. It is about love that is felt to the fullest, given to the most extreme, and unreturned in the harshest of manners. Sometimes humorous, sometimes enlightening, and overall witty and wise, this book not only explores yet another life that tries so very hard to achieve its dreams, but it takes that life to the next level, a spiritual level, where it just doesn't really matter what happens, because it is indeed important and cherished no matter what life has in store. I love this book, and am so glad that Oprah has now introduced it to the world. If only she would introduce A Beautiful Bucket of Bones by M. Luci to the world, I would be a very happy person (maybe one day). These books make life more enjoyable.

What a great story. While it may seem simply like a tale of unrequetted or delayed love, it is much more and is more enjoyable everytime I read it. After just a brief encounter, Florentino falls in love with Fermina when they are young, but she is forced to marry another, and Florentino thereafter pines after her until her husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies and he can again declare his love to her. What happens to them between these times and the short story afterwards is what makes this story great. You'll find in the end an understanding of and have a deep feeling for all three characters.

This book lives up to its reputation as a very romantic tale of unrequited love. Although it is quite wordy, one should take the time and make the effort of concentration to read it slowly and savour the images that the words conjure up. Without having read this book in its original language, I think that it may lose a bit in translation.

In my opinion, this might be a good book for a college literature class but to read for enjoyment-- not so much. I found it very difficult to read and in my opinion ranked right 'down' there with "Mrs. Dalloway" from my women's lit. class in college which was equally as hate-able. I tried my best, read over 120 pages but just could not get into it. I like a book that tells ME a story-- with this one I needed my dictionary by my side and it felt like homework.

Starting with one of the best first sentences in all of fiction, Garcia Marquez follows that up with a beautiful, remarkable novel. This book is full of lush prose on top of a dramatic tale of everyday human existence. I've tried several times to read Marquez's most famous of novels, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', but it never hit me the way this novel affected me. This book contains many life lessons if you care to see them. Never give up on your dreams. Dare to live a hopeful life.

Realizing that you don't like Love in the Time of Cholera is a bit like realizing that your beloved grandfather, who takes you to baseball games and makes you laugh at will, is an old bore with a lousy sense of humor. This doesn't mean that you love him any less - and it is virtually impossible not to love the tidal sweep of Garcia Marquez's sentences or the sunset splendor of his voice, which makes real life seem like a shadow of its Marquezian doppelganger - but you are forced to acknowledge that the novel is repetitious and self-indulgent, too often evoking the feeling of boredom by being boring. In contrast to the majesty of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the magical effect of this novel (and it does have a certain magic - the texture, if not the content, of a masterpiece) is simply a result of the passage of time, with Marquez leaving the main story on hold for 53 years and 250-odd pages to entertain us with sexual and scatological anecdotes, and the tale of Latin America's bout with the 20th century, a standoff between the apparently inexorable waves of modernization and the eternal truths of a coastal town: cholera, corruption, requited and unrequited love. As Florentino Aziza embalms himself in his pursuit of anachronistic love and Fermina Dava ossifies into a stately aristocratic housewife, Garcia Marquez increasingly loses sight of his characters and focus instead on showcasing his talents: it is like watching a master pianist, eyes closed, luxuriating in a particularly resonant chord and forgetting to carry on with the song. It may be beautiful but it is bad writing. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, the suicide whose character is carefully devloped over the first 50 pages, is entirely dropped. Time moves unsteadily backwards and forwards, and the characters can be inconsistent, sometimes within a single paragraph. The potentially critical relationship between Florentino and Juvenal is never explored, while Florentino's most compelling affair (with a girl 60 years younger than him) remains emotionally opaque.

We want this to be a masterpiece and occasionally, especially in the tender descriptions of old age, it is close to perfect, but Marquez fails to deliver on its potential, selfishly keeping the novel to himself rather than surrendering it to its characters.

First, when it comes to this edition:

I've only read this book in Spanish. However, I know for a fact that this is an excellent translation (I've begun reading it in English.)

Definitely a heavy weight novel. Marquez has an incredible ability to wander the depths of the human psyche with such grace and beauty.

His metaphors are unsettling and eye-popping. Whenever my father and I comment on them, we can only react by exclaiming: "OOOOH!"

Imagine this: He portrays a whore-house and the mysterious things lovers leave behind -- like blood stains, buttons, vomit, tears and semen -- as a [paraphrase] "palace of love fallen in disgrace."

Powerful images like the one above are found throughout the entire book. A delight from start to finish. Or as my father would say, it is a constant "OOOOH!"

A simple story full of well-presented details, with sound, smell, colours and texture. Even you don`t believe in love, it worth the time and effort to go through it.
I can`t help but comparing Tomas of Unbearable lightness of being with Florentino. Tomas escape love in order to stay with lightness but at the end of his life he can`t get rid of Tereza; Florentino refrain himself from loving other for he believes his love is only for Fermina. They have slept with hundreds of women, good or bad, just for short-lived love and sex, and believe that fidelity is nothing to do with causal sex. I think it is a fantasy of man: The fate/destiny of a man is to have a woman who is his crowned goddness for spiritual love, and hundreds of sex mates for fullfiling of physical needs.
I just can`t accept Florentino, at his 76, fall in 'love' with a little girl only 14 years old and is under his guidance.
There are so many types of love in this book that sometimes you have to stop a while and ask yourself: Is it love? What is love?
I enjoy the book very much though in the middle of it the come and go of Florentino`s lovers are a bit bore and excessive. As a woman, sometimes I can`t quite follow Fermina`s thought because most of the women will not react like her did. She is a crowned goddess created by the author.

This was a moving and amazing story. The love was complicated and painful and real, not saccharine and light. The language of the book wraps you up in the story before you realize you're caught up. I read it in two days, and I loved every minute of it. The inspiringly beautiful complexity has compelled me to read everything I can get my hands on in the search for anything else with this kind of power.

García Márquez has an interesting view of love -- to me much more like obsession. An intricate tale of two lives that intertwine for a time, go their own ways, and come together again. You almost like the characters, despite their flaws, but I never quite reached that point.
García Márquez tells stories, and gives them a rich tapestry to make you feel you understand -- and he did it again. I, however, prefer to like the characters as much as I like to feel I understand them. Not my favorite of his works.

If ever there was a novel that typified the passion of the tango, this is it. Breathtaking with unexpected moves and turns of plot. Garcia captures the madness of passion and of love,and the hopelessness and the utter faith it can bring or demand. A tour de force. This is one of those rare books that is worth a second or a third reading.

This is an extradinarily well written book that captures the beauty and passion of first love, the enduring quality of true love, and reinforces the belief that love is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. This books also gives the reader a rich glimpse into the societal practices and lifestyes in Columbia for the timeframe for which it was written. The book richly captures its characters with euphorisms, metaphors, and humor so realistically that you miss them as each character exits the story.

If you want a story that you will become totally immersed in, I highly recommend this book. It was wonderful!

I am not someone who normally reads novels with romantic themes.I read this book over seventeen years ago when my literary diet was spy thrillers and business novels. This was the only book I had stuck in a house during a stormy vacation. It was my introduction to the world of fantasy realism. I was simply blown away with the beauty of Marquez's narrative. This book transported me to a place I had never been and evoked emotions I never new existed.

The strength of this author's genius is that his work survives translation yet his stories affect all cultures. While there are many stories of unrequited love this story is one of the best.

Many have told me that Marquez's other works are better. I disagree. Then again I am biased since this book was my initiation to his work.

For some reason this book tries very hard to get its audience to be sympathetic to a man who falls in love or so he thinks with a girl he doesn't know. Trying to be faithful to the "Love of his life" he sleeps with every one in his town from widows to 14 year old girls when he is past fifty. Not the type of person I am usually sympathetic for. The main character doesn't have any redeeming qualities except poetic writing but even that is over the top. How can you write thousands of pages of love to a girl you know nothing about except for her name? This book is so unrealistic, the characters are not interesting and the plot keeps getting sided track to events that have no real importance at all. The only likable character (and I say that lightly) dies from a pathetic tragedy that seems at first to be relevant to the plot even if it is unlikely but no that too was just more wasted words. If this is what I can expect from Oprah's list I will steer clear.

I read this book about 15 years ago because a very bright co-worker had said she did not like it. I was curious. This book is a keeper, a book to be reread. Although a love story in time of cholera may seem an odd scenario, I was very happy that I chose to read it. It made me think of The Plague and a song from the 60's about a castle surrounded by plague. Life can go on in the midst of disaster.

I admire GGM's patience for love both in love in the time of cholera and hundred years of solitude. he is alive when he talks of the waiting years. he thrives in the longing, he carves and carves the walls of a waiting heart and nourishes the memories. that's what makes it breathtaking. the suspense is carefully and patiently savored, its juice came ever so sweetly.
excellent,too are his brilliant thoughts on ordinary ircumstances. there were things one would not thnk of verbalizing but there they were blinding you with the simple fear or discomfort of truth.
there is however a part that left me rather lost, maybe out of misinterpretation. there is a portion in the book i found unresolved. I believe, in a book, all holes must be covered.

Garcia Marquez makes the art of the illusionistic surreal seem realistic at the pace of a snail. Fabulously written, the book takes you through a journey of unparalleled proportions that you have probably never been on. a delightful read,an intimate and sincere look at the characters give the reader the feeling of being one with the characters. you almost feel as if you are one of Dr.Urbino's patients. a must read for an enthusiast of life.

This incredible yet believable and captivating story is worth reading and reading again. The writing is brilliant as one would expect from a Nobel prize winning author, but the book's power comes from the story itself. Garcia Marquez helps understand the nature of love itself by giving us a paradigm of committment. When I think of how to define love I am drawn to St. Paul's letter to the Corinthians and this story of committment that survives time, disappointment, self-delusion and many other trials and tribulations. This is book is one for the ages. Hopeless romantics will love it.

I liked this book quite a bit. I thought the characterizations of the three protagonists were excellent, detailed; Garcia Marquez can make the most mundane detail speak volumes about a person. The ending, too, was a surprise -- bittersweet, melancholy, and I know it will linger in my memory for a while. Complaints about Ariza's relationship with his young ward are silly and reactionary, especially since Garcia Marquez clearly puts this relationship into a moral and character-development context.

Joanna Orzel
HLW-3
2/18/10
Book Review

A genius of literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes an amazing story of love, its symptoms, actions, and influences in a person's life. In the novel, he is trying to accomplish telling the story of many different types of love, from the love of Florentino and Fermina, to the romance stories of different characters intertwined in the plot.
Marquez is a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, and with good reason. He is an enchanting writer, twisting together words and plot lines in an alluring format. The style that he writes in is often called magical realism, for the themes and the sub-plot occur and are present in real-life, but the way by which he describes it all is full of extraordinary circumstances and fantasy.
Marquez gets the point of the story across very well. The reader will delve into the personal lives, affairs, and events of all the characters in the story. The book focuses mainly on the love between Florentino and Fermina. It also touches on love that is illegal, adulterous, dangerous, and passionate. While some parts of the plot get graphic, it is only in certain points and it helps to illustrate and carry across the love that the author is trying to portray.
The book is somewhat difficult to read because the plot moves slowly and takes patience and determination to get through. Some of the words were also challenging; this may just pertain to young high school readers, like me, who do not have a well-built vocabulary. If the reader is looking for a beautifully written, breath-taking, detailed novel that attempts to understand and explain the infinite concept of love, this book is perfect.

To all those English speaking readers, DO NOT refer to the author as "Marquez". You may be surprised to learn that Gabo's last name starts with a "G", yes, as in Garcia Marquez! As inconvenient as it may seem to the short attention spans of the 21st century, there are those of us who do not discard, move or remove our mothers' last names from ours for the sake of brevity. It makes sense now more than ever when you can find at least a dozen individuals with whom you share first and last names. That aside, LTC, just as all other Garcia Marquez writings, is beautiful and moving, yet disturbing at its core. Why do so many male authors feel compelled to paint their male characters as unidimensional beings solely obssessed with their sexual "conquests"? Are they trying to make up for a lack in real life? I certainly hope that allegations that LTC is based on the author's parents' love story are unfounded, because that would make theirs a very sad story where "el que diran" ultimately ruled their life decisions. But maybe Gabo came to be exactly for that reason.

When you feel a hunger for more of that beautiful, haunting Marquez style, Love in the Time of Cholera is the place to go for your next meal. Another great work by Marquez. Begin with the taste of food on a hungry tongue. End the meal with gratitude for another great book by this author.

The modern, recently published Love in the Time of Cocaine: Sex, Drugs, and the Colombian Cartel by Alvaro Alban is clearly an ode to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. Clearly, the latter is also about love in all its forms and at this time of year, as we get close to Valentine's Day, it's a good time to re-read this literary classic. Bravo Marquez!!

Personally, I'm not a big fan of death, the elderly (because of its association with death), and classical novels (My anti-cliche tendencies). Yet after the first twenty pages, i found myself hooked. If you need a book with Imagery and no ambiguity about the setting, this is the book for you. I'm a theatre geek, and Maequez's imagery is genious. Almost every page, i could set up a scene and reenact it for you. From his mango tree to the office, it's impossible to read this book and not feel a sense of omnipresence. Also i don't like reading long novels, because i don't have time or they don't attract me, i usually read short stories with plithy. Yet, i found myself, procrastinating my math homework to read this book. Also, I don't like deaths, but Marquez doesn't make death seem like this gloomy thing, he kind of describes the deaths in the books as a poem or some romantic song. It sounds eccentric but when Dr. Urbino died, it wasn't like "How sad", it was like some slow song you hear on your way home.
Also, i just got out of a rough relationship, and reading this book gave me some weird hope in the male species. Florentino Azina is so adorable, and this love he's had for so long. It sounds cheesy but if you read it, Marquez phrases it so well. To all those ladies, who are in "I hate men" mode, this is the book for you. It's really pretty.
I haven't finished but after this, i'm going to read other Marquez books, because he's so good at writing romantic novels.

If not, then you shouldn't consider Florentino Ariza one either. This is a startlingly good piece of literature, but, pedophilia is never justifiable--not even by Oprah! Shame on her! Ariza RAPES his ward--seduction in his mind, but it ultimately destroys her soul. So just like all the pedophiles and child murderers, he justifies his actions as love. Borrow the book from the library & read it--don't pay for a new copy wherein a pedophile is touted as a romantic hero. He is a complex character--both good and bad. But for our society to make someone with this much evil in him into a romantic hero dilutes both the original story and its value and allows pedophiles to justify their behavior.

A classic by Marquez, but for me it's by far not as ingenious as "Hundred years of solitude". Of course it is masterly written, Marquez is a born storyteller; all his typical ingredients are in the book, and you can recognize the typical flavor immediately. But the story he tells, with all due respect, is just faint pulp fiction.

Even though I did not particularly like any of the characters, I found them annoying or dis likable, but I still loved this book. Also I was grossed out by the 14 year old. Marquez is just a really great writer and it was a unique and great story. I also really liked the ending. Read it, love it. Now on to 100 Years of Solitude.

Several people have indicated that this is a difficult read. It is. Perhaps it's the translation, perhaps it's the abundance of imagery. But whatever it is, it's worth the effort.

Having read One Thousand Years and The Handsomest Drowned Man, I'm familiar with his use of prose and magical realism tendencies. If you can get past the linguistic hurdles, you're in for a wonderful story of the commitment of one man's heart.

I read this book for my neighborhood book club and I was very disappointed. The writing style is very wordy and difficult to follow. To call it verbose and rambling would be generous. There are excessive details about extraneous events and many unnecessary characters that are challenging to follow. I didn't feel connected with any of the people and finished the book without feeling any inspiration. The characters' behaviors and choices were often revolting (for example, an old man molesting a minor female, winning her affections, "dumping" her, and then feeling no remorse when she kills herself). I would NOT recommend this book. Not worth the time if you're looking for something to add to your life. "The Notebook" is a much better lifelong love story that will touch your heart.

Ah.. There is very little prose, which may be as lyrically structured as that of Marquez's. There is very little prose, which describes the state of love sickness more beautiful than that of Marquez's. As I was reading this book I "sighed and sighed and sighed ...".

One of the amazing skills of good story telling is to make and break biases. This skill is exemplified by the author's ability to weave out intricate patterns, but only to unwind them later as you move along the story. I have the habit of categorising people according to 'my' mental gauge meter. And alas! I found my state akin to that of a delirious, intoxicated and inept sea captain navigating using his poorly calibrated sextant. Watch out for a whole lot of inconspicuous psychological traps / paradoxes introduced intentionally by the author.

Novel captures the full continuum of manifestation of love. Traversing this continuum, I think is the heart and purpose of the novel. The told story, its characters and incidents are vehicles which takes us through a fascinating and highly rewarding tour of this landscape.

We choose this book for book club over a year ago. No one finished it. I got the further than anyone as a read 1/2 of it. Now that I have read the other one star reviews I am glad I didn't waste more of my time. Why am I writing this review - to up the one star reviews and to let more people know that many people did NOT like this book. I have never ever not finished a book club book. I don't really remember much about it other than it was very descriptive to the point of verbose. I did not connect with main characters emotion. How do you fall in love with someone on sight? I just didn't get it. I had one friend suggest that the book, first written in Portuguese, perhaps didn't translate well

this book is absolutely captivating. I finished it ....and immediately wanted to read it again...and I did.. slowly savoring every chapter. It only got better the second time. Highly recommended!!. A movie based in this story is coming out in December 2007; I can only hope the movie can capture the magic of Garcia Marquez.

Read the other readers' reviews for plot details. I couldn't say it any better. I just want to add that this would make a wonderful gift for that special someone you love madly and profoundly.
In my opinion, GGM's best work!

I'll admit, Garcia Marquez is my favorite author among all authors (J. K Rowling and Ruiz Zafón follow). But I didn't like at first, I kind of forced myself to read "A Hundred Years of Solitude" . . . and I ended up loving it. That one, along with Love in the Time of Cholera, highlights the genius of Marquez and every word, every sentence, makes the reader submerge in the magic realism of hot afternoons, dark nights and unrequited love. I read the original, that is, in Spanish.

Well-crafted, poetic, beautiful novel of a life lived with the hope of love. Not as well-written as 100 Years of Solitude, but a perfect example of how a novel should be written-combining beautiful prose with a great story, full of wit and flavor.

Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

If you love a book that relentlessly sticks to the main topic and drives you forward toward an inevitable, if unknown, end that satisfies, then you must read this book. Any paragraph will capture you and make you read more, make you read passages aloud to your friends or lovers.

I was a little hesitant about starting LITTOC because I'd never read Gabriel García Márquez before. I didn't know what to expect when started reading, but I was pleasantly surprised by his quirky characters. What reeled me in from the beginning is the fact that it's not your normal everyday love story.

I have just finished reading this book. I thoroughly enjoyed the first hundred or so pages, which set up a great story of unrequited love. The rest of the book was interesting enough, but had very few dramatic plot twists and an extremely unsatisfying ending. Considering the incredible importance given to Florentino Ariza's unending passions for Fermina Diaz, the eventual state of their romance by the end of the book seemed forced and unrealistic. Almost all of the characters have within them major flaws, which shouldn't be a problem, except none of the major characters seems to have much of a soul despite their constant musings on love and passion. I felt that this book was at least 75 pages too long, and did not find it particularly beautiful or fulfulling. Plenty of colorful language, but the evolution of the story was not to my taste.

We don't expect to hear about the ailments and not so sexy bodily fluids of our heroes and heroines, but here they are, from Fermina Daza's diarrhea to Florentino Ariza's constipation to the smell of Juvenal Urbino's urine. We watch them lose their hair, get fat and wrinkle. Yet we love them, and we love the way they love each other.

I tried. I really tried, but just couldn't complete the book. Paragraphs that ran over a page in length, confusing characters that did not engender much compassion, a boring story that just wouldn't end, etc. I could go on and on like the author did. I know I'm in the minority of reviewers, but I cannot believe I tried to read the same book that received all those high star ratings. The book I read was like plowing wet earth. Note to myself: Stick to the 50 page rule, "If it isn't enjoyable by page 50, it isn't going to get any better. Move on to another book."

Marquez is a master of description, delving into the contents of the human heart in a way in which most of us would have thought impossible. Undoubtedly, his purpose was to put to paper the epitome of true love - the story of a man's unwavering devotion to the woman he loves and the trials they must both endure in their search for happiness. This is a book so beautifully written that if the reader is at all capable of understanding the nature of love and what it brings then Marquez's words will find an easy path into the soul of its interpreter.

I realize this isn't a solid book review for such a highly acclaimed work, but I'll offer my two cents worth anyway. I tried reading this a number of years ago on the recommendation of a close friend. Rare as it is for me to quit a read, I couldn't get halfway through it. The overall feel of it was a monotone; nothing grabbed me or pulled me in. Also, it had an overwhelming feeling of depression, both for me and seemingly for the author. Honest to god, the only detailed memory I have of it is the main character taking a whiz and lamenting how he didn't have the powerful stream he had as a young man! Ironically, this seems like an apt metaphor for the way the book struck me overall.

Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera, is an excellent book for mature readers. The story begins with a young poetic man named Florentino Ariza who falls in love with a young girl named Fermina Daza. Florentino tries to get her attention by sending her love letters. Fermina ignores them, but when Florentino finally tells her how much he loves her, she falls madly in love with him. Fermina is sent away for a year when her father discovers that she is planning to marry Florentino without his permission. When she returns she realizes that what she thought was love was only an illusion, so she refuses to see Florentino again. Florentino remains faithfully in love with Fermina even when she gets married and starts her own family. They speak to each other for the first time in more than half a century at Fermina's husband's funeral . They begin to talk to each other again, and remember the good times that they used to spend together when they were young. Their friendship grows, and we wonder how long it will take them to realize that that they still love each other even after so many years have gone by.

One of our favorite quotations is on page 82. This is when Fermina's father discovers that his daughter loves Florentino. This quotation shows how Florentino views love: all powerful and worth dying for. When Fermina's father says "Don't force me to shoot you," Florentino replies: "`Shoot me,' . . . `There is no greater glory than to die for love.' "

We feel that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is a very good writer. He is extremely descriptive, has a feeling about love in every form, is creative, and imaginative throughout the book. He is able to capture the readers' attention with his simple but complex story.

This book may be inappropriate for young readers because of its sexual content. This is one reason why we recommend this book to mature readers. Another reason is that younger people may find the plot excessive. Anyone who enjoys reading about the many forms of love in a descriptive way will find this book a pleasure to read. If some readers find the long plots tedious at times Gabriel Garcia Marquez will compensate for them later on.

I loved this book. The author writes about the main characters, Floretino Ariza and Fermina Daza in depth, but keeps just enough mystery about them that is revealed, little by little, as you keep reading. Ariza is a little pathetic and a martyr, and there are disturbing aspects to his personality.
Fermina has her flaws also. However, this is a fascinating love story that spans over 51 years, full of surprises, including a beautiful ending.

This novel is more than deserving of any and all accolades received. The first time I have read this author. It is, both, simple and complex. The words, to me, were like flowers and music. I will read more of his work. I loved reading this book. This one is special.

A friend insisted that I read her copy of this book. I have honestly tried to enjoy it even half as much as apparently she did but.....slow is an understatement. Also, the lack of chapters and sometimes even paragraphs made it even harder to read.....harder to come back to ...etc. I finally scanned the last 100 pages and considered it a victory that it was finished.

This book was recommended by Oprah. I guess I don't like the same kind of literature she does because I have found this difficult to get through. Like other books she has recommended, they are not entertaining enough for me.

that's what i liked about it, all the details. without them the story wouldn't be worth reading. i mean, i still think about the doctor in the story, who said there are two kinds of people in the world, those who can sh-t (poop) and those who cannot. come on it doesn't get any better than that.