January 2008 Host: Rachel

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Summary

Love in the Time of Cholera is set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a coastal Columbian town and is the story of a tortured and obsessive love (a love that is much like cholera). Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza meet and fall in love as they communicate through letters, which goes on for a few years. When Florentino first speaks to Fermina, (years after meeting her) she rejects him and eventually marries a wealthy, well-born doctor. Florentino is devastated as he had sworn to love her forever and tries to fill the void through the decades with 622 affairs. More than fifty years later, Fermina’s husband dies as he tries to rescue a wayward parrot from a tree. Florentino again approaches Fermina to profess his undying love for her. Intertwined throughout the main plot are stories of various loves that are platonic, dangerous, geriatric, adulterous, etc. This was an Oprah’s book club selection and the author is a winner of the Nobel Prize.

Discussion

-Marquez is an excellent writer, his prose is rich in detail with just the right amount of humor mixed in.

-After agreeing upon the previous point, we spent the rest of the evening trashing the book. We felt that the book “lacked” - perhaps that ‘something’ was missed in the translation.

-We had trouble liking or even caring about any of the characters. Florentino Ariza has over 600 affairs and is unscathed by any one of them. One such example is that he molests a fourteen year old who later commits suicide - we understand that the author was trying to get across that older men can love. (Florentino was in his 70s when this happened) but, yuck He had mental issues and it was agreed that his character was disgusting.

-One of the characters was brutally raped when she was very young and never married because she was waiting to again meet and then marry her attacker. Yuck again.

-Florintino Ariza was portrayed as being an expert in writing romantic prose and letters, yet the author did not include one of them in the book, which was disappointing.

-There was much ado about Fermina’s husband’s chess partner dying. There was a buildup to the opening of a secret letter….which revealed only hat he had been having an affair. We were led to believe there would be something more significant in the letter.