Love, Love Me Do... (Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

Member Name: Deany

Product:	Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Date:	20/12/01 (864 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Enthralling story, history of Latin America

Disadvantages: Poor ending, can get repetitive at times

As the title may suggest, this is a novel about love set in ... well, the time of cholera actually. However, to think of it as nothing more than a simple love story would not do justice to a book that spans a lifetime and paints a colourful picture of an emerging Caribbean country.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a Columbian author and winner of the Nobel prize for literature. He was originally a journalist and continues to write non-fiction reports as well as the novels for which he is better known. I was drawn to this book after recently reading another novel by the same author – “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, which is perhaps his most famous. “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is an excellent book which I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone interested in a good read or the history of Latin America. In it, Marquez charts the development of a family and the village they found for over a hundred years – taking in civil wars, banana trade and the growth of the entire nation along the way.

Anyway, I am not writing about that book here, I am writing about “Love in the Time of Cholera”. This is a novel that is very hard to describe without giving away too much of the plot. In its most basic form, it follows a love affair that lasts over fifty years from adolescence to old age. The main characters – Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza – catch sight of each other as teenagers and begin an exchange of letters in which they proclaim their love. When one of these letters is intercepted by Fermina Daza’s father, it sets in motion a chain of events that only reach resolution over half a century later.

The action takes place from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, in a time when the countries of the Caribbean were plagued by frequent outbreaks of cholera. Although the love story is firmly in the foreground, Marquez creates a background in which it is possible
to read the entire history of the nation. He makes passing reference to civil wars with alarming frequency, the constant fighting between Conservatives and Liberals that has shaped much of the history of Latin America. The city in which the novel is set begins as a small town on the edge of a swamp, but as the plot progresses it develops into an important port and distinct areas begin to appear where the well-off live in safe seclusion or the poorer elements of society huddle together in ramshackle huts. The effect of innovations such as the telephone, typewriter and a regular postal service (things that we take for granted) are shown, sometimes with comical results.

Another way in which the world changes during the book is the environmental impact of humans in the rainforest. In the earlier half of the novel, one of the characters takes a trip upriver in a boat that lasts for many days. On the way he spends hours watching the manatees sunning themselves on the river banks, the crocodiles with mouths wide in an attempt to catch butterflies and listening to exotic creatures calling out in the forest. Later, when the same traveller makes another journey the results of deforestation are plain to see. Where there were once forests there is now nothing but wasteland and the animals along the river have died out. It is only then that the reader realises the price the country has had to pay for many of the advances it is so proud to have achieved in the rest of the novel.

However, Marquez’s main theme in the book is love in all its many forms. In the main characters’ early love affair he examines the traditional, romantic notion of love when they are driven wild with desire by a mere exchange of letters without actually meeting, let alone speaking to each other. This is love from a distance, and is eventually shown to be nothing more than an illusion where each individual has created a false image of the person they believe to be their true l
ove. This affair seems strange to the modern reader, although it is an accurate portrayal of how courting used to be carried out. The art of letter writing was considered a great achievement at the time and letters could sometimes be exchanged for years before a couple would dare to speak to each other – sometimes with the very first words being a proposal of marriage. As time passes in the novel and the art of letter writing dies out I could not help feeling that something beautiful was coming to an end. Although it would be anachronistic to try and carry out a relationship through letters in this day and age, it adds an air of romance and mystery to the relationships in the novel that it is hard to convey nowadays.

When this period of love comes to an end, Marquez examines two opposing ideas of “love”. On the one hand, he looks at the love of a wife for a husband she did not initially care for, but who she comes to love after the marriage as they get to know each other. This is a much more sedate period after the initial wild romance of letter-writing. Fermina Daza settles into married life, carries out her roles as a wife and mother and attempts to find her place in society. The affection she feels towards her husband manifests itself in the meals she cooks for him, by sewing buttons on his shirt or in petty arguments and later reconciliation. Their lives merge to such an extent that the only time she can realise how much she loves her husband is when they are parted and she sees his image everywhere.

Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, turns his back on this form of domesticated love and engages in a string of affairs with women all over the city. He keeps a detailed diary of every woman he ever sleeps with and the total at the end of his days is over six hundred. He turns to the women out of a need of his own to be with someone and the need of the women concerned to feel loved, either because they are widowed or because they
feel their husbands are not paying them sufficient attention. It is ironic that the only women Florentino fails to seduce are those who he actually falls in love with. Along the way, Florentino encounters all forms of love – happy marriages, failed marriages, prostitutes, young girls needing a father figure, those desperate just to be held and loved by anybody … the list goes on and on.

As you might expect from a book that focuses on one main subject, the constant emphasis on love can become a little repetitive at times. However, Marquez manages to craft interesting stories for each of the ideas he presents and the reader is drawn into the characters’ lives. One criticism I do have, though, is that the novel is very descriptive with only short and infrequent sections of dialogue. This is fine when the book begins and the writing style is novel, but towards the end it can become a bit of a struggle to wade through page after page of solid text with hardly any breaks. And the ending, when it does come, is a little too sudden. I realised that I was nearing the end up the book, but was shocked when I turned a page to find just one paragraph remaining – which also left me feeling a little cheated as it left things up in the air somewhat, although the major issues were resolved.

Another criticism is not really a criticism of the book itself, but rather of the author. In “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, Marquez peppers the book with examples of “magic realism” – this is where the most bizarre things happen and yet they appear perfectly acceptable and realistic in the context. For example, at one stage, one of the main characters who is renowned for her divine beauty simply spreads her arms and ascends to heaven while hanging out the washing. It sounds surreal, but in context it appears (almost!) perfectly normal. For me, this was one of the most enjoyable elements of the book and I was hoping for more
of the same in “Love in the Time of Cholera”. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. There are a few, vague glimmers of magic realism in this book, but nothing on the scale of what I was expecting and as a result the story appears much more plain. As I said, this is not a criticism of the book itself – if I had read this one first I would not even have known Marquez used magic realism and so would not have missed it in the first place.

On the whole, though, Marquez’s writing style is wonderful, almost hypnotic. The story starts about four fifths of the way along its timeline with an excellent “red herring” tale of one of the main characters who suddenly dies before the main thrust of the story begins in earnest. The remainder of the book is told almost entirely in the past, although it reaches the point in time of the beginning of the book eventually and finally passes beyond it. Marquez even manages to provide echoes of Proust by beginning the novel with a smell that sets in motion a series of events and reminiscences.

One final point that I have only found out since reading the book – in the original (Spanish) there is a play of words on the word “Cholera”. It is referred to both as “el cólera”, the disease that is rampant in that area at the time and “la cólera”, which can be defined as choler or anger and in its extreme becomes warfare. As a translator, I was dismayed to see that the translator of the text into English had made no attempt to convey this in the version I was reading as it would have added to the book. As it was, every time I saw a reference to cholera I simply assumed the author was referring to the illness (which may just have been me being slow on the uptake, but I’m sure other readers had the same problem).

To finish (at last) this is a great book. If you are new to Marquez and want to get a feel for the author, I would probably recomme
nd reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude” first as it is, in my opinion, the better of the two. However, “Love in the Time of Cholera” should not be overlooked and I will definitely be looking out for more books by this author in the future.

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