Love in the Time of Cholera

by: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Published by: Vintage Books

Reviewed by C. L. Rossman

Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the eminent South American physician, responds to an urgent call one morning, but he already knows what he will find: A war veteran and children’s photographer, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, has taken his own life and that of his Great Dane, by burning gold cyanide. The oddity is that the man killed himself “not for love,” which would be an acceptable fate—but because he turned 60 and was afraid of growing old. An investigation reveals that the man had a female lover who understood and helped him do it.

This sets off a series of incidents which see the good doctor himself dying an ignominious death –in pursuit of a pet parrot—and his wife Fermina Daza, suddenly confronted at the funeral by a childhood sweetheart, who has never been able to let her go. In their youth, Fermina and Florentine Ariza fell passionately in unconsummated love—he serenaded her under the stars and they exchanged passionate love letters. But the would-be betrothal was broken off by Fermina’s father and by her own haughtiness.
Now, even after all those years, when both are over 70, Florentine has never forgotten her.

And 51 years, nine months and four days after he first pledged his love to her, he will declare it again. Even a lifetime later, will she reject him all over again?

This passionate and intense love story, written by a Nobel Prize-winning author, first saw print in 1988, was re-issued in paperback in 2003 and now becomes a major motion picture, the ideal medium to tell the story of the characters’ long and turbulent lives. The book is dense, intense and fascinating, with the fire of a more passionate society than our cold northern climes can produce. Translator Edith Grossman has done an outstanding job, too.

This fierce love story will make as intense a movie as it does a book. Read it for something totally different than the sex-and-forget novels being published today.

Armchair Interviews agrees!

Author’s Web site: www.TheModernWord.com/gabo