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
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
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.
While reading this offering as a teenager probably contributed to my interpretation of Florentino, I can’t deny it was a labor reading through the “heart” of the book, where Florentino transforms himself from desperate and unfulfilled to a sex maniac in denial. GGM might have even seen this coming, since Florentino’s “fall” into his new life comes after a “rape” that he didn’t contest with much vigor as it was. The magic realism I expected wasn’t present much either–talking parrot, random trench-coat-wearing man with baby chicks in his pocket, 622 affairs–and I think that’s why I absolutely loved reading 100 Years of Solitude, whereas I simply enjoyed thinking about LITTOC afterward, because 100 Years had so much going on inside, versus the limited focus in LITTOC.
A very good book, not on a level with One Hundred Years of Solitude but still better than most. The affairs number has always annoyed me though; 622 affairs equates to roughly one per month for 51 years. How would anyone have the time for that? If someone’s full time job was having affairs it would still be nearly impossible to have that many.
GGM’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores has an interesting theme – sex and love being mutually exclusive.
Maybe I am an arrested adolescent myself, but I actually think Cholera is GGM’s best work. While the bewildering magical realism of 100 Years is definitely stronger, Cholera provides a much a more focused, albeit exaggerated look at the main character. The notion that Florentino’s love for Fermina is so massive that it consumes nearly everyone in its wake is a very vivid image, and one that definitely carries the book. I think GGM’s intention is to shock the reader with Floerntino’s actions because that is the only way to explain the depths of his love. I guess one could call that arrested development, but in many cases of irrational love, especially unrequited, well, that is exactly the result.
The complexity of the characters, especially of Florentino Ariza, is what makes the book so fascinating. You claim not to want a Hollywood style ending, but you are turned off by the unexpected nature in which Florentino is presented to us. He is not a hero, like we might expect in a Hollywood movie. He is part hero, part antihero. His devotion is to be admired, pitied, and scorned at the same time. His actions are often despicable. He can’t be unabashedly rooted for like the Orioles, but he can’t be unabashedly rooted against either, like the Yankees.