spoiler added
Can unrequited love last a lifetime Thats the premise of this book, Ayearold man pines for a woman all his life, Now her husband has died, Does he still have a chance
The man and woman were in love as teenagers, but they mostly exchanged secret notes, She was guarded by her nanny and when her father discovered the relationship, he took his daughter away for three years, It worked.
When they returned to the city the young girl no longer loved the boy, She married a man who became a prominent and wealthy doctor, The doctors claim to fame was cleaning up the Colombian city of the open sewers that led to cholera, Inwere told the man is, so you can figure out the time frame,
The main character has an uncle who runs the local steamboat river shipping company, He starts out sweeping the docks, becomes a clerk, and over the years eventually rises to manager, As manager he attends various cultural events in the city and occasionally gets a glimpse of his beloved, She and her husband are the most socially prominent people in the city, Sometimes he gets a smile or a nod from her sometimes not, Meanwhile
The story alternates between his story and hers, The constant civil wars of Colombia provide background, Finally her husband dies and, not having talked with her foryears, he makes his move,
There is excellent writing as we would expect from Marquez, Some passages I liked:
“He was still too young to know that the hearts memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
”
At one point the woman confronts her husband about his infidelity he admits it and weeps, She is disappointed because he did not do what she had hoped he would do: “deny everything, and swear on his life it was not true, and grow indignant at the false accusationeven when confronted with crushing proofs of his disloyalty.
”
“She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.
”
“Always remember that the most important thing in a marriage is not happiness, but stability, ”
“ No, Im not rich, he said, I am a poor man with money which is not the same thing, ”
An excellent book, I had read this years ago and I should have reread it sooner, A classic from the master of Latin American literature that I will add to my favorites,
Photos from top: A street in Cartagena from cartagenaexplorer, com
Steamships on the Magdalena river aroundfrom media, istockphoto. com
The authorfrom okdiario, com I don't like this book,
I don't like the characters, This was going to be a list, but then I realized that this is the only reason I have,
Florentino Ariza is a baby, Seriously, his mom gives him whatever he wants, and she tries to make everything all right for him, and he is very, very, . . if he lived today, he would be one of those emo kids with the dyed black hair and the eye liner and the journals full of bad poetry he does write bad poetry, in the book, all "Nobody gets me," and just a grating, timesucking, high maintenance type.
He rationalizes his behavior in whatever way he can, so he never feels that he is doing anything wrong,
I grew impatient with him fairly quickly I wanted to wring him by his neck and yell, "GET OVER IT!!!" I have no tolerance for that kind of behavior.
Sometime during the Seduction of the, it says that Florentino Ariza thought that when a woman said no, she really meant something else that's a paraphrase, This is another thing I have no tolerance for, So, when he persisted in his attentions to Fermina Daza, even after she'd made her own feelings quite clear TWICE, and she came around to his way of thinking, it justified his behavior.
I don't think he should be rewarded for that, I think he should be kicked to the curb,
Fermina Daza was almost likable I was almost there with her, but then I realized that there wasn't anything really likable about her, She was efficient and organized, she was wellbehaved, and she was boring, Why did men love her What did she have to offer I DON'T KNOW,
I did like Juvenal Urbino, Of course he dies in the first chapter,
It seemed to me that the book dragged on FOREVER I kept looking ahead to the end of a chapter and sighing, "Fortytwo more pages, " The chapters are long. Even though two weeks doesn't seem like a long time, it's a long time for ME to be reading a book, particularly one that isn't a thousand pages long and written in Elizabethan English.
I didn't think this was any kind of love story, Like Wuthering Heights, it's more a lovegonewrong story, or an obsession story none of the characters really displayed any of the traits that I would associate with love, one whichthe chief one, I would sayis selflessness.
None of them were willing to put anyone else above themselves, and maybe that's why I didn't particularly care for them, or for this book,
I've written a more indepth review sitelinkhere, Ditching his trademark magic realism for something more along the lines of psychological realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez'snovel is by far and away the best book I have read by him.
With gorgeous, lucent writing, full of brilliant majestic whirls, splendour and humour, and a final few lines that finish off the novel almost perfectly, the Colombian simply excels as a writer, and doesn't drive the reader around the bend with a bucket load of longwinded names like those featured in 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'.
Set mostly in an unnamed coastal Caribbean city, and spanning half a century sometime betweenand, the novel is simply about love, A love told through all its ages, Garcia Marquez is said to have fashioned his romantic love triangle on the courtship of his parents, though these years correspond more to the lives of his grandparents, Love in the Time of Cholera shows a decidedly modern sensibility, an urban rather than a rural society, and shows it with less mysticism and more social detail than was deployed in the earlier works, that simply adds up to a novel that is easier to relate to.
Gone are the ghosts, the voodoo, and the strange happenings, replaced by an arrow crammed full of love, aimed with pinpoint precision at the heart,
One thing is for sure, Garcia Marquez simply loves his characters, but writes about them with a full understanding of their limitations, In his propensity to write passionately, and even beautifully, about the inner life of a character he ultimately dislikes, his insistence on never sentimentalising his protagonists in such a way as to exceed their place in the world, he is a Marxist, but also a catholic in his conception of what is universal and inherent in character, and in his belief in the human soul.
These two convictions fight it out through the narrative, and like everything else in Garcia Marquez, they fight strongly, giving the characters' public and interior lives a deeplytextured, rigid, and precise brilliance.
He writes with much passion about the daily bonds and tensile strength of a marriage, And throughout his novel the question of but is it love hovers and floats over the meaning of a husband and his wife, The three central characters of Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and Dr Juvenal Urbino are all certainly memorable ones, and Garcia Marquez spends as long as it takes to get across his main theme, writing for nearly a hundred pages about extravagant, innocent, highpitched, poetic, romantic love, as Florentino Ariza falls head over heels for Fermina Daza one day.
Fermina, the lonely, forlorn girl does becomes a woman of the world, She turns into the bourgeois great lady her father wanted her to be, but its Dr, Juvenal Urbino who takes her hand, whilst Florentino Ariza simply waits, with great patience, spanning year on year on year, for her husband to die, and reclaim the one and only true love of his life.
Out of sheer agony, Florentino becomes a womaniser, saving his all his pure love for Fermina,
He manages to find distraction in an endless series of sordid affairs, great and small, with widows, with a woman who sucks a pacifier, and even with a child that is in his custody.
Garcia Marquez and his communal voice judge the singleminded pursuit of love harshly, and his judgement extends to a literature which handles the subject superbly well, without the need to get all soppy.
Themes of poverty and of riches run strongly, and he tells us a great deal about the internalised longings born of class inequality, and throws in sub plots, both traditional and idiosyncratic, from the most predictable to the sublime, but they only really flutter around the central characters, giving them the greater importance.
The pace of the narrative works beautifully, and only ever gathered speed as Fermina's father takes her on a long journey to try and make her forget Florentino.
During her absence Florentino takes to diving on sunken galleons as a way to take his mine off her, It is Florentinos fate to wait for love, and to make the most out of waiting,
The real magic of the novel for me lies in the fact that Garcia Marquez sets up a predictable plot, gets a little fun out of it, before twisting it around, and letting it fall away softly.
It is not so much a story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back in this case the girl is now a much older woman as Garcia Marquez is always stubbornly committed to the voice of the community: individual happiness is not considered an absolute good.
So although, in the end, Florentino may seem victorious in old age, his life of devotion was not lived without cost, “He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
”
Because I'd heard that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera was so different from One Hundred Years of Solitude one of my favorite novels, it took me a while to actually read it.
Love in the Time of Cholera is very different from , One Hundred Years, but it is a wonderful characterdriven story that spans the entire life and loves of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, They had been passionately in love in their youth, but Fermina eventually rejects Florentino for a wealthy doctor, Florentino's life is spent in expectation of one day reuniting with his love amid a reportedaffairs! Fantastic ending!,stars.
“To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter.
He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.
” I did not enjoy this at all, This is a book about a weak man excessively obsessed with a married woman for overyears, He pines his time away withsexual encounters that he records and we have to read through, The book is SLOW! He is sickly obsessed, He's a pervert, possibly a pedophile, He finally is reunited with his true love when she is in her's and then he describes their bodies and love life, Don't recommend this to anyone! This is not what true love is, . . it is
a book about obsession and weakness, Wasted my time when there are so many wonderful books out there to read! I feel suspicious about the fact that I didn't fall for this book the way Florentino Ariza fell for Fermina Daza.
I am compelled to blame my lack of appreciation on poor reader comprehension rather than GGM'S writing, because only one of us won the nobel prize and I'm pretty sure it wasn't me.
However, I'm no idiot either, so I'll at least take the liberty to explain my grievances:
, As a synesthete, I found Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza's names to be WAY too similar, They look the same I kept getting them mixed up! I think it was unecessary to pick the two most F, vowel, R, N and Z laden names ever for use in this one story.
. The narrator kept making very definitive, bold claims thatpages later turned out to be completely untrue, For example not real quotes "This particular bedfellow was the closest thing to love that Florentino Ariza ever experienced apart from Fermina Daza, " Turn the page, now talking about a brand new lover, "Now, as it turns out, THIS particular bedfellow was actually the closest things to love that FA experienced apart from FD.
" Next chapter, another new lover "Okay, SERIOUSLY, this is the one this time", . . etc. Similar broken promises were made about various other topics, Perhaps this was done on purpose to demonstrate the fickle nature of life or love or something like that, but for me all it did was make me yell at the pages, scolding the narrator for being a big liar.
. Florentino Ariza mid's, Young Girl placed in his "care", It's just not okay. P. s. She later kills herself because he ruined her life and stole her innocence, and his only reaction to it is that he has a bout of indigestion while lying in bed with the woman he left her for.
. . what a swell guy. P. s. he also kinda kills another woman, . . the one on whose stomach he writes with red paint and her husband murders her when he sees it,
. The whole premise of the book is the waiting, . . FA is waiting to finally be with FD, And when the wait is over, I don't feel like there's any reward, Nothing between them is all that magical, . . yeah they have fun on the boat, sure the fun is a little subdued because of their age, etc, . . but ultimately I don't understand what the point of all that waiting was for when he seems to have just about as much a connection with FD as he had with any of the otherladies over the years.
I dunno as I stated in point, the ABSOLUTENESS of this book is what really holds it back for me, He says he absolutely loves FD, better than the rest, into eternity, . . he says this, but the reality is actually quite different, The ending is the same kind of thing, . . is that boat really going to sail up and down the river FOREVER No, It's not. So why cheapen it with the gross exaggeration, . . just say "until we die" or "until somebody makes us stop", . . it doesn't sound as cool but it means more,
In summation, it wasn't a horrible book but there were a few things that made it less than perfect, The writing really redeemed it, however, and made the experience pleasurable overall, An example of this is the detail GGM throws in about Urbino drinking chamomile tea, any then rejecting it, saying that it tastes like windows, Everyone is perplexed, thinking he must be crazy, Then they taste it themselves: Yup, Windows.
.