Love in the Time of Cholera

I am finally hopping off of the mystery train and hopping on to the classics train with Love in the Time of Cholera. This was a doozy to read, fighting between being angry at the differing cultural views on love and women, and being caught up in the romanticism because of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s wonderful writing. That is the warning I will give you before you read it.

Love in the Time of Cholera is about [Spoilers] a man named Florentino Ariza and his never ending love of Fermina Daza, beginning when they are children. Florentino is from the poor side of the tracks, being the bastard son of a CEO who holds the monopoly for river boat transportation, whereas Fermina is from long standing wealth. Slowly, they fall in love, writing letters to one another to a point where she is kicked out of her school and her father takes her to live with her mother’s family in a faraway city. Despite the distance, Florentino finds a way to keep communicating with her and the love never dies; in fact, they vocally become engaged. It is only when she blossoms into a young woman and returns home, that upon truly seeing him for the first time since they had never actually spent time together, that Fermina realizes that she really does not know anything about Florentino and how much lower of class he is to her, and she breaks off the engagement. She ends up marrying a Doctor Juvenal Urbino, an equally wealthy man set out to modernize their city in more ways than medicine. While Fermina and Juvenal live a long happy marriage, Florentino never stops loving Fermina…

This is where line in the sand draws for me and the argument starts. Love in the Time of Cholera is a wonderful discussion book in this sense, it touches on the subject of how Florentino spends his life in response to Fermina living hers, which now that I think about it can be just as argumentative while keeping in mind that the time frame of this book spans between mid/late 1800s to almost 1930s, so the culture will be incredibly different from where we are now. While keeping in mind that Fermina rejected Florentino and that he repeatedly says that he does this because he is eventually numb and the only flame he has in life is Fermina, Florentino sleeps with over 600 women throughout his life with the condition that he never “loves” them or has a serious relationship because he wants to save himself for Fermina; and yet, he says that he keeps a logbook of all the women he ever slept with, there were some women who were raped, and he presents stalker-ish behavior with Fermina. Should they fall back in love and get married as he hopes, he plans to lie to her and say that he never slept with anyone. I gave a lot of spoilers on this review, but at the same time, this was a touchy thing for me of whether I should be angry about this or not. It says a lot about the attitude of women being so disposable to a person should that be the mindset a man has, and taking this to the world it can be a vice versa situation; it also says a lot about coping with grief and loss in terms of love. I would also like to point out that Fermina did not have to just flip the switch the moment she saw him; I have read opinions of why she does, but to me the deep rooted reason of why she did is because she became a stuck up snob and classism. I mean, the guy tries really hard to one of them, but she saw through his attempt and tore him to shreds while using the “we really do not know each other” excuse. She could have stayed and they could learn about each other, making them not strangers. I think because of what happened, Florentino devoted his life to making himself into a man that she would want, while at the same time exacting revenge toward her by sleeping with literally every woman alive, save that amazing co-worker of his.

On the flip side of the coin and how I did not just burn the book, Márquez’s style of writing is so wonderful. It kept my attention and the story flowed smoothly, like a lazy river that weaves in and out of Florentino’s and Fermina’s lives, bringing you full circle to a great ending. It was so easy to get caught up in the romanticism of the book, like I said earlier, that the lulls of Florentino being an absolute creep are slightly redeemed with the highs of Fermina living her best life with Juvenal.

I do not know how I feel about Love in the Time of Cholera, if I like it more than I do not. I would say that if it drew that much of an argumentative feeling inside, my husband said that I must have enjoyed it because I kept reading… then he would laugh at me for getting so angry at a book. Either way, I do not plan on reading this again. I gave my copy to a co-worker of mine because it was on her list of books to read. Even if I do not plan on reading this again, I would recommend other people to read Love in the Time of Cholera. I do have another of Márquez’s books, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I am excited to read that. In the meantime, you can find Love in the Time of Cholera here if you want to try it.

8/10