Love in the Time of Cholera.

I’m a big fan both of Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez’s work and of magical realism in general, so I was excited to pick up Love in the Time of Cholera , which promised to take Garcí­a Márquez’ style and apply it to an epic romance. The result is more the story of a man who refuses to grow up, and in the end, is rewarded for it.

The plot of Love in the Time of Cholera revolves around the long-suffering Florentino Ariza, who falls in love with Fermina Daza when the two are teenagers, only to see her reject him and marry the wealthy young doctor, Juvenal Urbino. Florentino decides that he must wait for Dr. Urbino to die, at which point he can resume his pursuit; in the meantime, he will get his rocks off with almost every woman who crosses his path (the novel claims he has 622 affairs over the 51 years of Fermina’s marriage, not including one-night stands, seemingly a mathematical impossibility for a man with a full-time job, even granting that Florentino conducted some of those affairs simultaneously), with a particular jones for widows. (I’ll give you all five seconds to glean the significance of that. Got it? Excellent. Let’s move on.)

It seems that this is intended as a soaring romantic tale of a love that wouldn’t die, that transcended the years, and so on, but that feeling disappears from the novel the moment Fermina rejects Florentino until after Dr. Urbino dies. Garcí­a Márquez (GGM, from here on out) tells us Florentino’s emotional state is due to his immense ability to love, but it seems to me that Florentino was suffering from a case of arrested development. When he approaches Fermina just hours after her husband has died to reiterate his undying love for her, he’s not being romantic – he’s acting like a self-centered teenager, tone-deaf to the emotions of the people around him. It is as if he has caught a disease and doesn’t wish to be cured.

That ending is one of the book’s brightest spots; it’s a clever and unexpected resolution to a plot that looks to be headed toward a predictable, Hollywood-style ending (they get together, one of them dies, the women in the audience cry and see it over and over again), and it includes some of the book’s best writing. GGM does have an incredible gift with prose, and uses it to great effect in parts of the book about love and sex, fear of aging and death, and familial relationships:

But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him [her son], they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

One negative aspect I’ve noticed in other GGM works shows up again here – his obsession with bodily functions. For example:

Even when it was not the season for asparagus, it had to be found regardless, so that he could take pleasure in the vapors of his own fragrant urine.

Wow. Thanks for sharing. Good thing this wasn’t a scratch-and-sniff edition. One of the fantastic things about GGM’s masterwork, One Hundred Years of Solitude , is that it transports the reader into a sort of dreamstate, where closing the book results in a brief moment of confusion that’s akin to waking up in the middle of a vivid dream. Yet Love in the Time of Cholera continually interrupts any of its own attempts to create that immersive, dreamlike feeling with verbal tritones about urine, feces, vomit, or semen.

By tying up the romance story and fading out the various little subplots one by one, GGM leaves the reader with a satisfying ending that’s not unrealistically happy (one of the subplots ends very badly, although it’s brushed off a bit in the broader context). The problem is the meat of the book, where the reader sees Florentino and learns he’s not a romantic hero but a juvenile antihero unworthy of the exaltation that the ending seems to give him.