Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez REVIEW 

I might be in the minority, but I like Love in the Time of Cholera more than 100 Years of Solitude. Love and especially unrequited love is meditated in ways that are devastating to the soul. It made me understand the relationship between pain, love, and joy.

I've read just about everything Marquez ever wrote, including his short stories, but so long ago that I can only draw on one thing that impressed me, if my memory serves me well. I didn't go back to look at his work, just went with a gut feeling. Marquez has a wonderful sense of place and time, but he does it with simplicity of means. He avoids unnecessary adjectives or adverbs, deriving his effects from observations and contrasts to evoke an atmosphere. It is what makes his style appear so effortless and unlaboured. I'll have to go back some time to see if my memory is playing tricks or not.

I am Colombian, and read this book while I was a teenager. I loved it, and I have forgotten so many things about it, but what stayed in my mind is that the love that florentino felt for Fermina felt very romantic to me and I think it had to do a lot with my age. I think that idealistic almost infatuation just felt at the time very juvenile, deep and romantic. Somebody loving you that way by just looking at you, without even needing to know you. I really have to re read it, I think I will think very differently about it now that I am older and prefer a more traditional and calm type of love.

Only a young person would think that this book is about love. Love is just the name by which Marquez is calling time. This novel is about age.

Great, great novel, Garcia Marquez was a titan, his books are masterpieces of 20th century novel.

I agree completely that GGM is presenting different versions of love -- prosaic love, idealized love, etc. -- and, in some ways, asking us which is the best. Is idealized love better than prosaic love? Is love an excuse for cruelty, for obsession, etc.? I think it is one of GGM's achievements to make love, with all its flaws and virtues, with all its cruelties and beauties, a character.

I'm Portuguese so I completely understand what your friend meant with the Italian translation being closer to the original. If I can, I always try to read the book in the original language. I have a decent level of Spanish but I'd never even think of reading GGM in the original. Portuguese is like a brother to Spanish, Italian is a cousin, so your friend is absolutely right. The only downside is English translations tend to be cheaper and easier to get to.

Best closing line ever in a book!

Ok, I just finished this video and I read it similarly to you - Florentino was a major creep in my opinion. I started off wanting to love him, but objectively he comes off like Joe from You (I dunno if you've seen that show). I am team Dr Urbino!! He was there for Fermina through the hardest parts of life, and didn't just love her based off some idealized version of her. I spent like 20 minutes yesterday thinking about how the book brings up bodily functions so often (Dr Urbinos pee, diarrhea, Florentino being constipated) and it confused me so much lol, but I suppose that's building towards the larger overall theme of love as a physical infliction.

Have you read One Hundred Years of Solitude? It is one of my favourite books. Great review as always. You are one of the best, keep it up 😊

I've wanted to read Marquez for ages & ages, I should hurry up and take the plunge! This looks like a good place to start.

The best thing about the book are the love affairs of Florentino and the way they overlap with each other. The best being of America Vicuna's overlapping with Fermina Daza's .Two diametrically opposite characters one who is ready to be in love and give her all to Ariza and other for whom Ariza has to do this. GGM's plays on taboo are also nice as he makes the reader accept the "old people's" love story of Ariza and Daza but he makes us question subtly about the Vicuna -Ariza love story .Both are taboo in the time the event takes place but the Ariza-Daza is socially acceptable to the extent in the era the novel was written but not the Vicuna -Ariza,thus it is a great study of Taboo and the fluidity of how poeple define right and wrong .

Marquez's style seems so polarizing but it's why I love him. Great review!!

I’ll reread A Hundred Years of Solitude soon and I plan to read Life in the Time of Cholera shortly after. Luckily, I’ll read both in the original Spanish. Great review!

you convinced me to read it. it goes on my summer tbr list.

I’m a native Spanish speaker and funnily enough, I like also reading GGMs books in English if anything, to see what convoluted translations they have to come up with to imitate his writing style, not to mention the weird and often untranslatable words Spanish and it’s slang can provide

I relate to what you said in the beginning. I have a lot of books that I'm in no hurry to pick up and it is a satisfying feeling to know that I've got so many books ahead of me that I know I'm gonna like or love. For example lately I've been reading one book by Iain M. Banks per year and I've still got five in the Culture series to go so it's five years if I keep the pace.

Nice review! The only book I liked by GGM.. Greetings from Bogotá!

I think the author used the riverboat company's destruction of the river habitat as a parallel to Florentino's lovelife. It's a book that made me feel like shit because I couldn't stop rooting Florentino.

One of my favourite books of all time. I agree, it's a complicated look at love. I adore the scene where Florentino drinks the perfume... but then he doesn't really wait for Fermina, he has relationships, he visits prostitutes.. best opening line of all time, too!

Please also give review on one hundred years of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 🙂🙂

Good thing that you are reading spanish books in Italian as it gets closer to the original version. Wondering which translator? The one from Italian to Spanish for Umberto Eco was simply fantastic.

Read this a while ago. Need to read it again , it was beautiful if I remember correctly. Haven't read 100 years of solitude, yet for some reason. Thanks Bookchemist, I'm reading Cathedral right now by Carver. Just read The Magician by Maughm. Hearing you say the characters names brought about so many images.

I support Dr. Alvino. I loved the part that he dies, and tells her, only god knows how much i loved you. Is a far more real love, a build love

Latin American here. I read lots of García Márquez' books when I was a teen and I loved or liked all of them. I read this one a week ago and... I really didn't like it. His prose is as beautiful as ever, and I saw most of what you describe in your review. But while you read the book as "very critical of the way he lives his passion for Fermina and it comments on that very clearly", I mostly percieved in it a celebratory tone. Maybe I'm dead wrong here, but for me this is what set this book apart from books like Pedro Páramo and The Death of Artemio Cruz, to name a couple of Latin American classics where male main characters do some hideous stuff. In those books there's a negative tone for their actions, not a celebratory one, and they are portrayed as deeply disturbed men. As for Florentino, I felt he was portrayed as a somewhat eccentric man, but no more than most others in the novel, a rational man (yes, with his own particular rationale, but not like deranged). It also felt the book was compelling me to root for him, at least once the way is clear for him towards the end. It's weird to feel like the moralist since I rarely see myself as that, but honestly I was expecting one of the following in regards to his actions: a in-story comeuppance, a clear condemning comment from the narrator or maybe even just dropping the celebratory tone. But I didn't see that happen. Again, maybe I read this book blind. Or maybe I'm just a bit tired of García Márquez and so many writers from my Latin America telling the same story again and again, and also shoe-horning explicit descriptions of adults grooming and having sex with naive and usually family-related minors, or describing 80% of female black characters as "hot" or any other sexually charged term.

Thanks man..my fav literature guy discussing my fav novel..thats great As for Marquez, you can sense in his works that he is the kind of a story teller who fully experiences life then transmitts the lesson or the experience itself to his readers..in Love in The Time of Cholera, he expresses his longing for the beautiful days around the turn of the twentieth century as well as he tries to revive values like faith and hope with the charming end of the novel..the novel was written in a postmodernist context when the two wars have devastated the world, threatening the very existence of faith and hope.. It does not matter who wins vermina datha..what matters is that the characters of the novel together resemble life with its cruelty, injustice, and madness..madness like waiting for decades for one's beloved to become available again..the novel represents life with its characters..and suggests remedy in hope and faith.. Nevertheless, it is still open for many other interpretations..one person once applied psychoanalysis to it and it made perfect sense to me..

LOVE this review! As always great analysis!

Hi! Great video, love your channel. Do you mind repeating those first two authors you mentioned? I love Murakami and Roth, would love to read more like that.

***SPOILERS*** I found Dr Urbino's quote, that "marriage is not happiness, but stability" really represents his attitude towards his relationship with Fermina. It explains why he cheats on her, as if it's only natural he do so. That quote stands in firm contrast to a much later one, used to describe Florentino and Fermina's feverish boat trip: "Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity." I feel like that is closer to Marquez' own feelings inside of all the social chaos of the 20th century

I fell in love with the doctor right away and could never root for Florentino. I think it is an open question: which is the central love affair in the book? I believe you are correct n calling it a catalog of love, not simply the story of one love affair.

Getting the opportunity to read this masterpiece in Spanish is another level, it’s just gorgeously well written. It’s something that you don’t ususally find in English literature

100 years of solitude is one of my favourite books so I need to get round to this one!

What do you think about Mario Vargas Llosa's work? Ps: great videos, i really appreciate your channel👍

But it's the end of June and you have a heavy sweater on >.

Sounds great. I'll read it ✌️

I’ve got to get around to reading this!

beautiful review

Great review! Great book!

I think the comedy in this book is overlooked, it drips with sarcasm and irony.

Dude, you should read some books by Alberto Laiseca. Right now are three of his novels translated to Italian and none to english but, man, he is amazing. A hysterical post modern argentinean hell of a writer. Review some please!

I love Marquez.

Marquez is also. perfectly translated in Russian

Thank you lot for your review it was very educational to hear your mind i would like to add that Florentino was a highly manipulative creature and what he was looking for through whole his live was an ascape from intimacy. He was false, his life was one big lie for which he was ready to sacrifice every women he met and dr Urnibo.. i support nobody cuse nobody here inocent

Great book, wonderful writing, a present-day master piece...I just wonder how it can be looked at from the lens of feminism. The novel still has me satiated and meditative on what love really is?

Maybe i'm older and skeptical, but it didn't reach me … I felt their reunion was inevitable , which well we knew it was … seems like a story I've heard … seems dated, imho

Very good. ❤️

I always felt something missing in the translations of Marquez's works in English, 🤷but I don't even read Spanish or Italian even so I'll never know until I've learn the language just to read it 🤦

Second

Remember the movie “A night at the Roxbury”? No? Well, you would definitely remember one of its song which was popularised by Jim Carry by nodding his head with two others in a car. Still No? ♪ ♪ What is love? Oh baby, don’t hurt me Don’t hurt me No more ♪♪ Well, now you surely do remember. So let us answer the question asked fourteen times in the song. What is love? Well definitely it is not roses and chocolates and butterflies, but hey, the song is also screaming twenty-eight times “Don’t hurt me”. So, mathematically ‘hurt’ is double when you ask ‘love’. I am not saying any of this, it is Jim Carry along with Gabriel Garcia Marquez who are saying such absurd things. I am just analysing the song. Alike many of the readers, I too am a fan of the magical realism fiction “One hundred years of Solitude” which bumped me into another of his great work. Although love stories have never appealed me, you cannot escape this genre in the fiction world. Love, which is a set of maddening activities that lead to a lot of pain also invokes suffering, waiting, threatening which is all mental and none physical, is beautifully described in this book. This is a story of one Florentino Ariza and his beloved Fermina Daza who fall in love with each other in their early youth. However, when the matter is disclosed to the father of the female here, she is taken away to a distant relative to spend some days away. The trick actually worked and when the father-daughter duo returned to their home, Fermina has had a blurry memory of her lover. She gets married to the most eligible bachelor of the town, a doctor with high strata and affluent income and a family name to support everything Fermina could ever wish for. It was easy for Fermina to move on with her life. A lavish lifestyle including multiple world tour with her husband was an additional reason for her to forget Florentino entirely. Read the full review at: afictionaltale.wordpress.com/2019/09/23/love-in-the-time-of-cholera/

Hey, I wish you have an Instagram account. I bet it would be as cool as you :) In case, you have one- what is the handle?

One Hundred Years of Solitude is in a different league to this. This is just a lousy book which they gave a great writer the career Nobel Prize for and thus critics had to like it. The story starts off exciting but then just dies after the Dr dies and then we just wait around for the past to catch up with this event at the start of the book. Horrible story structure.

First

When you introduce books and authors you speak too fast :'(

Almost in the middle of the book, the narrator says that Leona Cassiani is the woman of his life, and neither of them ever knew it, and they never made love. I take that to mean that among his mistakes, like child rape and murder, he didn't end up with the right woman.

Man maybe I just wasn’t connecting to the story but I absolutely HATED this book. I hated the characters and had to force myself to finish it.