Love in the Time of Cholera [Paperback]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: Quality Paperback Book Club (2001)
• ASIN: B000K6ZNE2
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (531 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,984,540 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

379 of 410 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Examination of Love, August 13, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love in the Time of Cholera (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) (Paperback)

I think a lot of the online reviewers of this book don't realize that this book is not about the relationship of Fermina and Florentino. The book is about love in all of its forms, and the characters in the book exist as vehicles to examine the strangest and most powerful of all human emotions. Love in the Time of Cholera is about: unrequited love (Florentino for Fermina); marital love (Fermina and Juvenal); platonic love (Florentino and Leona); angry love (Florentino and the poet who makes him so furious); jealous love (the adulterous wife killed because of her affair with Florentino); young love (Florentino and Fermina in the beginning); dangerous love (the mental patient and Florentino); adulterous love (Juvenal and his affair, Florentino and many of his women); love from afar (Florentino and Fermina); elderly love (Florentino and Fermina, Fermina and Juvenal; the cyanide suicide); May-December love (Florentino and his ward); the relationship between sex, age, society, art, death and love (pretty much the whole book).

I could go on, but you get the idea. Any attempt to read this book as the story of Florentino and Fermina misses the point. The book is still very enjoyable that way, but look beyond the surface and enjoy Marquez' ruminations on that thing called love that drives us all crazy.

Incidentally, I think it's one of the best books ever written.

100 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE MANY ASPECTS OF LOVE, June 9, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Love in the Time of Cholera (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) (Paperback)

Love in the Time of Cholera takes place circa 1880-1930 in an unnamed Caribbean seaport city. The three main characters form a triangle of love, with the hypotneuse being the quintessential romantic, Florentino Ariza, a man whose life is dedicated to love in all its aspects.

As a young apprentice telegrapher, Florentino Ariza falls hopelessly in love with the haughty teenager, Fermina Daza. Although the two barely meet, they manage to carry on a passionate affair via letters and telegrams, until one day, Fermina Daza, realizing that Florentino Ariza is more "shadow than substance," rejects him and marries the wealthy dandy, Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead.

Florentino Ariza, who has sworn to love Fermina Daza forever, is, of course, stricken to the core, but Fermina's marriage is nothing he can't handle. As one century closes and another begins, Florentino Ariza rises through the ranks of the River Company of the Caribbean and sets off on a series of 622 erotic adventures, both "long term liaisons and countless fleeting adventures," all of which he chronicled and all the while nurturing a fervent belief that his ultimate destiny was with Fermina Daza.

Fifty-one years, nine months and four days after Fermina's wedding, on Pentecost Sunday, fate intervenes and Fermina becomes a free woman once again when Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies attempting to retrieve his wayward parrot from a mango tree. Seeing his chance at last, Florentino Ariza visits Fermina Daza after the funeral and declares, "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." Fermina's reaction is not quite what Florentino was hoping for. She orders him out of the house with the words, "And don't show your face again for the years of life that are left to you...I hope there are very few of them."

Fermina Daza, however, hasn't quite gotten Florentino Ariza out of her system and the story ends, symbolically, with a river journey into eternity.

It's hard to believe that Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written a book that is better than One Hundred Years of Solitude, but with Love in the Time of Cholera, he has done just that. Not quite magical realism, it is still magic of the highest order and it is pure Garcia Marquez. An exquisite writer, Garcia Marquez tells his tales with passion, control and unblinking humor with just the right amount of the fabulous woven in.

Unlike some of his slightly claustrophobic works, this novel has an almost epic quality and Garcia Marquez handles the shifts in time and character perfectly; from the opening lines you know you're in the hands of a master. The book is flawless: Not one word is out of place, not one sentence is awkward. Lesser authors might slip into the maudlin when writing an entire book on the many aspects of love, but Garcia Marquez never gives us less than crystalline insight into what it really means to live, to love and to live a life of love. The last chapter alone is a masterpiece no one who's loved, or loved and lost, will ever forget.

As the book closes, we sail down the river with Garcia Marquez at the helm, safe in the knowledge that he is a navigator of the highest order, one who can pilot the river of love unerringly. He certainly does just that in this shining, sometimes funny and always uplifting book of flawless perfection.

142 of 157 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book for hopeless romantics, September 5, 2000

By 

Tere (Miami, FL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Love in the Time of Cholera (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) (Paperback)

If you swoon at the thought of hopeless, tortured romances, then you must read this book! Florentino Ariza's long (half a century!), passionate, and tortured love for the haughty, oppressed Fermina Daza is the stuff of masochists. When the lady of his heart goes and marries another man, Florentino spends his life pining over her. Despite his finding solace in hundreds upon hundreds of sexual encounters, his heart remains true to her. Everything he does, he does with the hope of one day regaining her love. His rise as president of the local shipping company, his redecorating his childhood home, his devotion to the arts -- it's all for her. So strong is his love for her, that his tortured passion resembles the symptoms of the dreaded cholera, the disease that repeatedly ravaged this Caribbean town. And of course, there is also Fermina's husband, the illustrious Dr. Urbino. As the most respected, most innovative doctor in the region, he is beloved by all..... except his wife, who married him more out of convenience than anything else, after she realized that the poor Florentino could offer her very little. So will Florentino get his woman after waiting over 50 years for her? This sad, tragic, often humorous tale is, for me, Garcia Marquez's best novel... a must-read for both fans of the author and hopeless romantics alike.