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Love in the Time of Cholera

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Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club) Paperback – October 5, 2007

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Author)

4.4 8,705 ratings

Part of: MARQUEZ 2014 (1 books)

in Caribbean & Latin American Literature

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • "A love story of astonishing power" (Newsweek), the acclaimed modern literary classic by the beloved Nobel Prize-winning author.

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

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MARQUEZ 2014
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368 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Vintage
Publication date

October 5, 2007
Dimensions

5.18 x 0.79 x 7.93 inches
ISBN-10

0307389731
ISBN-13

978-0307389732
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Popular Highlights in this book

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He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
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But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
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“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This shining and heartbreaking novel may be one of the greatest love stories ever told.” —The New York Times Book Review

"A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy . . . humane, richly comic, almost unbearably touching and altogether extraordinary.” —Newsweek

“Brilliant, provocative…magical…splendid writing.” —Chicago Tribune

“Beguiling, masterly storytelling…. García Márquez writes about love as saving grace, the force that makes life worthwhile.” —Newsday

“A sumptuous book…[with] major themes of love, death, the torments of memory, the inexorability of old age.” —The Washington Post Book World

"The greatest luxury, as in all of García Márquez’s books, is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality . . . the agelessness of the human story as told by one of this century’s most evocative writers." —Anne Tyler, Chicago Sun-Times Book Week

About the Author

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ was born in Colombia in 1927. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love In The Time Cholera, The Autumn Of The Patriarch, The General In His Labyrinth, and News Of A Kidnapping. He died in 2014.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.

He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next to him were the crutches. At one window the splendor of dawn was just beginning to illuminate the stifling, crowded room that served as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light for him to recognize at once the authority of death. The other windows, as well as every other chink in the room, were muffled with rags or sealed with black cardboard, which increased the oppressive heaviness. A counter was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumbling pewter trays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The third tray, the one for the fixative solution, was next to the body. There were old magazines and newspapers everywhere, piles of negatives on glass plates, broken furniture, but everything was kept free of dust by a diligent hand. Although the air coming through the window had purified the atmosphere, there still remained for the one who could identify it the dying embers of hapless love in the bitter almonds. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had often thought, with no premonitory intention, that this would not be a propitious place for dying in a state of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder obeyed an obscure determination of Divine Providence.

A police inspector had come forward with a very young medical student who was completing his forensic training at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room and covered the body while waiting for Dr. Urbino to arrive. They greeted him with a solemnity that on this occasion had more of condolence than veneration, for no one was unaware of the degree of his friendship with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. The eminent teacher shook hands with each of them, as he always did with every one of his pupils before beginning the daily class in general clinical medicine, and then, as if it were a flower, he grasped the hem of the blanket with the tips of his index finger and his thumb, and slowly uncovered the body with sacramental circumspection. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was completely naked, stiff and twisted, eyes open, body blue, looking fifty years older than he had the night before. He had luminous pupils, yellowish beard and hair, and an old scar sewn with baling knots across his stomach. The use of crutches had made his torso and arms as broad as a galley slave's, but his defenseless legs looked like an orphan's. Dr. Juvenal Urbino studied him for a moment, his heart aching as it rarely had in the long years of his futile struggle against death.

"Damn fool," he said. "The worst was over."

He covered him again with the blanket and regained his academic dignity. His eightieth birthday had been celebrated the year before with an official three-day jubilee, and in his thank-you speech he had once again resisted the temptation to retire. He had said: "I'll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans." Although he heard less and less with his right ear, and leaned on a silver-handled cane to conceal his faltering steps, he continued to wear a linen suit, with a gold watch chain across his vest, as smartly as he had in his younger years. His Pasteur beard, the color of mother-of-pearl, and his hair, the same color, carefully combed back and with a neat part in the middle, were faithful expressions of his character. He compensated as much as he could for an increasingly disturbing erosion of memory by scribbling hurried notes on scraps of paper that ended in confusion in each of his pockets, as did the instruments, the bottles of medicine, and all the other things jumbled together in his crowded medical bag. He was not only the city's oldest and most illustrious physician, he was also its most fastidious man. Still, his too obvious display of learning and the disingenuous manner in which he used the power of his name had won him less affection than he deserved.

His instructions to the inspector and the intern were precise and rapid. There was no need for an autopsy; the odor in the house was sufficient proof that the cause of death had been the cyanide vapors activated in the tray by some photographic acid, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amour knew too much about those matters for it to have been an accident. When the inspector showed some hesitation, he cut him off with the kind of remark that was typical of his manner: "Don't forget that I am the one who signs the death certificate." The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had the opportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young man's easy blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.

"And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost always have crystals in their heart."

Then he spoke to the inspector as he would have to a subordinate. He ordered him to circumvent all the legal procedures so that the burial could take place that same afternoon and with the greatest discretion. He said: "I will speak to the Mayor later." He knew that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour lived in primitive austerity and that he earned much more with his art than he needed, so that in one of the drawers in the house there was bound to be more than enough money for the funeral expenses.

"But if you do not find it, it does not matter," he said. "I will take care of everything."

He ordered him to tell the press that the photographer had died of natural causes, although he thought the news would in no way interest them. He said: "If it is necessary, I will speak to the Governor." The inspector, a serious and humble civil servant, knew that the Doctor's sense of civic duty exasperated even his closest friends, and he was surprised at the ease with which he skipped over legal formalities in order to expedite the burial. The only thing he was not willing to do was speak to the Archbishop so that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could be buried in holy ground. The inspector, astonished at his own impertinence, attempted to make excuses for him.

"I understood this man was a saint," he said.

"Something even rarer," said Dr. Urbino. "An atheistic saint. But those are matters for God to decide.''

In the distance, on the other side of the colonial city, the bells of the Cathedral were ringing for High Mass. Dr. Urbino put on his half-moon glasses with the gold rims and consulted the watch on its chain, slim, elegant, with the cover that opened at a touch: he was about to miss Pentecost Mass.

In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.

On the desk, next to a jar that held several old sea dog's pipes, was the chessboard with an unfinished game. Despite his haste and his somber mood, Dr. Urbino could not resist the temptation to study it. He knew it was the previous night's game, for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour played at dusk every day of the week with at least three different opponents, but he always finished every game and then placed the board and chessmen in their box and stored the box in a desk drawer. The Doctor knew he played with the white pieces and that this time it was evident he was going to be defeated without mercy in four moves. "If there had been a crime, this would be a good clue," Urbino said to himself. "I know only one man capable of devising this masterful trap." If his life depended on it, he had to find out later why that indomitable soldier, accustomed to fighting to the last drop of blood, had left the final battle of his life unfinished.

At six that morning, as he was making his last rounds, the night watchman had seen the note nailed to the street door: Come in without knocking and inform the police. A short while later the inspector arrived with the intern, and the two of them had searched the house for some evidence that might contradict the unmistakable breath of bitter almonds. But in the brief minutes the Doctor needed to study the unfinished game, the inspector discovered an envelope among the papers on the desk, addressed to Dr. Juvenal Urbino and sealed with so much sealing wax that it had to be ripped to pieces to get the letter out. The Doctor opened the black curtain over the window to have more light, gave a quick glance at the eleven sheets covered on both sides by a diligent handwriting, and when he had read the first paragraph he knew that he would miss Pentecost Communion. He read with agitated breath, turning back on several pages to find the thread he had lost, and when he finished he seemed to return from very far away and very long ago. His despondency was obvious despite his effort to control it: his lips were as blue as the corpse and he could not stop the trembling of his fingers as he refolded the letter and placed it in his vest pocket. Then he remembered the inspector and the young doctor, and he smiled at them through the mists of grief.

"Nothing in particular," he said. "His final instructions."

It was a half-truth, but they thought it complete because he ordered them to lift a loose tile from the floor, where they found a worn account book that contained the combination to the strongbox. There was not as much money as they expected, but it was more than enough for the funeral expenses and to meet other minor obligations. Then Dr. Urbino realized that he could not get to the Cathedral before the Gospel reading.

"It's the third time I've missed Sunday Mass since I've had the use of my reason," he said. "But God understands."

So he chose to spend a few minutes more and attend to all the details, although he could hardly bear his intense longing to share the secrets of the letter with his wife. He promised to notify the numerous Caribbean refugees who lived in the city in case they wanted to pay their last respects to the man who had conducted himself as if he were the most respectable of them all, the most active and the most radical, even after it had become all too clear that he had been overwhelmed by the burden of disillusion. He would also inform his chess partners, who ranged from distinguished professional men to nameless laborers, as well as other, less intimate acquaintances who might perhaps wish to attend the funeral. Before he read the posthumous letter he had resolved to be first among them, but afterward he was not certain of anything. In any case, he was going to send a wreath of gardenias in the event that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, had repented at the last moment. The burial would be at five, which was the most suitable hour during the hottest months. If they needed him, from noon on he would be at the country house of Dr. Lácides Olivella, his beloved disciple, who was celebrating his silver anniversary in the profession with a formal luncheon that day.

Once the stormy years of his early struggles were over, Dr. Juvenal Urbino had followed a set routine and achieved a respectability and prestige that had no equal in the province. He arose at the crack of dawn, when he began to take his secret medicines: potassium bromide to raise his spirits, salicylates for the ache in his bones when it rained, ergosterol drops for vertigo, belladonna for sound sleep. He took something every hour, always in secret, because in his long life as a doctor and teacher he had always opposed prescribing palliatives for old age: it was easier for him to bear other people's pains than his own. In his pocket he always carried a little pad of camphor that he inhaled deeply when no one was watching to calm his fear of so many medicines mixed together.

He would spend an hour in his study preparing for the class in general clinical medicine that he taught at the Medical School every morning, Monday through Saturday, at eight o'clock, until the day before his death. He was also an avid reader of the latest books that his bookseller in Paris mailed to him, or the ones from Barcelona that his local bookseller ordered for him, although he did not follow Spanish literature as closely as French. In any case, he never read them in the morning, but only for an hour after his siesta and at night before he went to sleep. When he was finished in the study he did fifteen minutes of respiratory exercises in front of the open window in the bathroom, always breathing toward the side where the roosters were crowing, which was where the air was new. Then he bathed, arranged his beard and waxed his mustache in an atmosphere saturated with genuine cologne from Farina Gegenüber, and dressed in white linen, with a vest and a soft hat and cordovan boots. At eighty-one years of age he preserved the same easygoing manner and festive spirit that he had on his return from Paris soon after the great cholera epidemic, and except for the metallic color, his carefully combed hair with the center part was the same as it had been in his youth. He breakfasted en famille but followed his own personal regimen of an infusion of wormwood blossoms for his stomach and a head of garlic that he peeled and ate a clove at a time, chewing each one carefully with bread, to prevent heart failure. After class it was rare for him not to have an appointment related to his civic initiatives, or his Catholic service, or his artistic and social innovations.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reprint edition (October 5, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 368 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307389731
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307389732
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.18 x 0.79 x 7.93 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #6,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1 in Caribbean & Latin American Literature
- #257 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #772 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Gabriel García Márquez

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Gabriel García Márquez (1927 – 2014) was born in Colombia and was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. His many works include The Autumn of the Patriarch; No One Writes to the Colonel; Love in the Time of Cholera and Memories of My Melancholy Whores; and a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

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Gregory Stone

The genius of Chaucer and Milton, though without answers to haunting questions

Reviewed in the United States on December 9, 2021

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Marquez combines the genius of Chaucer's unreliable narrators with Milton's mockery of the epic protagonist. He has even managed to dupe his reviewer into believing in Florentino Ariza's eternal declaration of love for Fermina Daza is praiseworthy! His masterful mockery of that declaration through the unfolding of the story is at least as good as Fitzgerald's flattening of Gatsby's idealist notions of his love under the cold, profane moneyed world of Tom and Daisy. While Fitzgerald flattens idealism, this novel flattens the shallow ego-centric infatuation that many call love in this generation.
A little observation reveals indicators of Marquez’s clear derision of ‘love’:

1) The narrator provides us an unmediated juxtaposition of two contrasting definitions of love: On one side, the narrator praises love as a thread of kindness and companionship woven through a tapestry of misunderstandings, trials, and temptations. Acts of kindness, forgiveness, and sanctification mark the story of Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza. On the other side, the same narrator praises love as a self-deceived ideal that is essentially projected onto Fermina, without recognition of who she is at heart. Florentino lives this love out in such a way that he convinces himself that acts of perfidy are actually acts of idolatrous devotion. A narrator who cannot distinguish between these two notions of love ought to evoke suspicion in any reader who has half a brain!

2) Florentino Ariza is like Gatsby gone promiscuously mad. 622 'love' affairs to preserve 'love'? The joke is on anyone who will believe it. A Gatsby who can't see the real Daisy for his idolization of her as a goddess is combined with a Marquis De Sade who takes every opportunity to objectify human beings as sexual objects. Ariza is a sexually deviant version of Jekyl and Hyde. He is so full of excrement, that he curtails his first visit to a widowed Fermina in order to gain relief by defecating in his own pants.

3) The path of fragmentation Ariza leaves in his wake is indescribably horrific. His 'love' affairs don't sizzle so much as they fizzle into a bleak, hopeless void covered only by the pretense of a shared desire to break things off. Percy Walker’s Binx would describe this as "dead, dead, dead." The pretense of 'love affairs' being anything but bleakly mechanical fornications is clearly shattered by Ariza's relationships with three women: 1) Sara Noriega, who will not hide her hostility at feeling used, 2) Olimpia Zuleta, who reveals the real cost of Ariza's campaign of careless seduction when her husband murders her, and 3) the capstone molestation of a 14-year-old school girl (one who is placed in his trust!) when he is in his 70s! Ariza’s selfishishness ends the girl's life by suicide while he still chases after his 'ideal' with only a passing thought for the tragic death of this girl he himself ruined! He is incapable of any meaningful attachment or responsability to the women he has screwed in so many ways. He loves no one, not even Fermina, but only loves his ideal of Fermina. His love is, in reality, nothing but an obtuse, self-centric, hellish lust twisted within the guise of idealistic love.

4) The final clue comes with a river boat that is stranded near the swamps. How fitting to end such a life in the stagnant, malodorous swamps of life! 'Love' that is merely a correlated amalgamation of so many discrete sexual experiences has no destination and no route out of stagnancy. There is no pilgrimage, no journey, no hope of redemption or even return to communion/community. As Edith Wharton's Countess Olenska told us, illicit love, for all its excitement, ends in a dark alley of bitter disappointments and disillusionment (the urban version of the stagnant swamp). And so our protagonist, like Milton's Lucifer, for all his boasting of achieving a great ideal, ends his life as a fragmented, isolated, impotent old man who drags his companions with him into the quagmire of hell.
Marquez's genius for building the narrative by shifting time and individual character narratives in order to provide contrasts not only between love and lust as ideals, but also the inner struggle between love and lust in the individual, keeps the reader in a state of inner conflict. The attempt to decipher just what love is and is not builds in tension just like the building of crisis in ancient Greek theater. This playing with/on the reader's expectation thus reveals the reader's own flawed view of love as much as it reveals the flaws of the characters. You, the reader, are exposed! The final catharsis itself doesn't provide resolution so much as it exposes the reader's own conflict between reckless escape from community (fragmentation) in order to follow personal fullfillment and return to community (wholeness). This is somewhat similar to the unsettling relief one might encounter at the end of Oedipus Rex.
The ending leaves us only with the daringly haunting question of what love is. This is assuredly better than presuming the trite answers that pervade contemporary culture(s), but one sometimes yearns for a Chaucer who not only poses daunting questions, but has the courage to answer them. But alas! That type of genius finds few appreciative minds given the spirit of the present age.

46 people found this helpful

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Tiwat Chutipat

Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez

Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2022

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It was highly regarded as The Top 100 Best Novels of the BBC. Funnily enough, people recognized "One Hundreds Years of Solitude" as his best. Even the former US president like Barack Obama admired that novel. But after I read both novels, I must say that I love this novel more than the admired ones. Since after reading this novel, I have bought two more versions of this book. Maybe it because I waited to read this novel for three years and known this novel for more than 4 years. The reason for my patience, it might be because I know that every book has an answer, something to guide and strive for. Maybe it wasn't a good timing for this book, until now...

Timeless novel, as we might not travelled by carriages & ships, might not send a love letter or even an emerald tiaras to our affairs. But some of the stories and terms are up-to-date and related. Even the novel title is related, since Cholera is a plague that needs to be quarantined and vanished by itself with no vaccines in the of the book, same as the infamous Corona Virus- The perfectly lovable characters. The jealousy, envy, and betrayal. The passionate love affair ended in a private catastrophe. His words are dreamy, enchanted, and fabulous like the eyes of an angel waiting for me to arrive. At first, before reading this book, I always thought of myself as Florentino Ariza, but after getting to know both characters I think I'm the perfect combination of Dr. Juvenal Urbino & Florentino Ariza. But after half the book, I know deep down that I'm more Dr. Urbino than Mr. Ariza, which I fell the sense of relief and calm till this day. After a great deal of breakups, my heart is still broken, but my soul is at peace.

Let the time pass, and we will see what it brings, by the time she unburdened herself, someone had turn off the moon.

7 people found this helpful

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A Memorable Work of Art

Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2022

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Love in the Time of Cholera is written with a similar weltanschauung as the works of Katzantzakis. In both the themes are not particularly deep or original: love, particularly the romantic variety, is the sole worthy thing in life; the Church and religion are nothing but darkness and hypocrisy; politics land social status mostly interfere with the proper dramas of life.

What then makes Love in the Time of Cholera a classic is its strength as a novel: the ingenious way cholera and romantic love wind their way through the book with the fevers of cholera revealing the power of Eros; the thoroughly realistic characters—at least in the sense that you suspend disbelief while reading the novel; and the beautifully invoked background of Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

As a work of art it succeeds brilliantly—especially if you read through its cathartic end. You could stand up as the proverbial Church lady and condemn its morality but you’d be rather missing the point; Marquez deliberately chose to write a subversive novel. If you are broad minded enough to at least read about the disparate paths we human wayfarers take through life, Love in a Time of Cholera is a deserved classic.

10 people found this helpful

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Raj P Srivastava

One of the Most Beautiful Books I’ve Ever Read. Pure Magic.

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2023

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Love in the Time of Cholera is Marquez’s greatest work. The most lyrical. The most masterfully written. And, even though it isn’t actually a work of magical-realism that Marquez is so famous for pioneering, it is still, somehow, the most magical. When you finish the book, you will regret leaving its characters, its setting , and its exquisite, flowing words and poetry behind. The sheer beauty of this book can change your life.

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dolmio

Classic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 3, 2024

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Remember this book from watching the film at the cinema years ago ….can only remember basic story line so nice to read detail and enjoy it

Dan

Arrived on time

Reviewed in Germany on November 26, 2023

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Wonderful book by a wonderful author

Shivani Grewal

Knocks the wind out of you

Reviewed in India on March 12, 2022

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A romance for the centuries: a love like no other, the loss, the meeting that was meant to be, the eternal hope, the passion that transcends age, love lost and found, pain, life, and the journeys that only those who love can embark on and understand.

I first read it when I was 17, returned to it in my 30s, and now, in my 40s, I am reading it with fresh eyes. A book that will captivate you and become a part of your life.

3 people found this helpful

Angel B.

Calidad y rapidez

Reviewed in Mexico on December 21, 2018

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Muy buen producto, coincide con lo ofertado

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nn

Good

Reviewed in Japan on March 11, 2021

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I'm happy I could find this edition.

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