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Love in the Time of Cholera (平装)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman (Translator)
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Fiction |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
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¥ 148.00
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MSL rating:
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| MSL Pointer Review:
The pain and beauty of an unrequited love stay long after you finish this odyssey of love that spans a lifetime. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 10 items |
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Newsweek (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy… humane, richly comic, almost unbearably touching and altogether extraordinary. |
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Chicago Sun-Times Book Week (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
The greatest luxury, as in all of García Márquez's books, is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality… the agelessness of the human story as told by one of this century's most evocative writers. |
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The New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
Revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality - youthful idiocy, to some - may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable… a shining and heartbreaking book. |
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Ed Uyeshima (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
Having just enjoyed his latest work, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, I was strongly encouraged to read this 1985 novel. I'm glad I did as author Gabriel Garcia Marquez captures the pain of unrequited love with alternating strokes of poetry and realism in a time-spanning treatment of a love triangle that begins in the late 19th century and ends in 1930. The triangle is composed of tortured poet Florentino Ariza, the grounded Dr. Juvenal Urbino and the inevitable woman in between, Fermina Daza. Characters and images flow in and out of the story with fluidity as Florentino pines secretly for the married Fermina over the course of fifty years.
In a manner that reminds me of the way Edith Wharton details the disquieting attraction between Newland Archer and Countess Olenska in The Age of Innocence, Marquez vividly illustrates the suffering that comes from Florentino's emotional exile when he views love as an abstract, nostalgic feeling until by chance, his love is on the verge of being fulfilled. While the author is expert in painting a picture of love that verges on noble, he doesn't shy away from the more ludicrous aspects that keep the highly dramatic Florentino from his destiny. In fact, there are parts of the book that are quite humorous, for instance, in the awkward park meeting between the teenaged Florentino and Fermina when the birds leave droppings on her embroidery, and much later, when Florentino eats Fermina's flowers simply to absorb her scent. Overall, Marquez maintains an insinuating lyrical tone, and it doesn't change an iota when Florentino emerges from his imaginary world to conquer Fermina. The beauty of the book comes from how the author painstakingly paints three fully embodied characters in a story where love is portrayed in all its elusive forms. This is a stunning novel by a true master. |
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Vivek Sharma (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
Love in the Time of Cholera is yet another brilliant work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez tells the story in a style where every sentence is pregnant with metaphors, every other phrase is a pinnacle of poetic expression, every lie is a truth seen in a new light, every experience is picturized in a magical realism of which he is a master painter! To use such talent in his masterful way requires a genius apparent in all his works!
The story revolves around two main characters, Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, and is spread over three hundred and fifty pages that describe nearly half a century of love in its various forms!! A love between a school girl and a nervous suitor to the love between them at the dawn of their second childhood: and everything in between that takes the reader through lifes, loves, escapades, and homes of several protagonists. The maze is as charming as in his other novels, with profound insight on love strewn, as if nonchalantly between spreads of interesting digressions that keep one as glued to the book as the fancy wordplay. To me Marquez represents a writer whose each word is born out of multiple layers of thoughts and complexity, that must spring from his acute insights and multitudes of experiences.
One must wonder what role cholera plays in the novel. It plays the same role as love, presents similar symptoms and likewise leaves people dead in its wake. This is a saga of requited and unrequited love, of social and ethical love, of moral and perverse love, of greedy and hungry love as well as sensual and vulgar love. It is a love story with a happy ending, but like any real love story had characteristic mishaps and trauma, pains and predicaments, joy and sorrow. Hell sir, what do you expect in a book titled "Love in the time of cholera" if not the paraphrasing of a plague that inflicts the characters of this saga?
Leaf storm and other stories is full of shorter and more tangile words; The Autumn of the Patriarch is about a dictators life; his rise and decay and is incredibly (difficult yet exquisite) read while the Hundred Years of Solitude is I guess the best of the lot. I found Love in the Time of Cholera more accessible than his other works, allowing faster assimilation a grand buffet of Marquez' visions and an endless servings of vignettes. Never for the fainthearted readers, I believe Marquez' works are excellent exhibition of the glory of the written word and the timelessness of great writing! His novels move through space and time with amazing fluidity, capturing the essence of people living for maybe a whole hundred years, and providing the detail and drama that accomplies life with words that interweave lie and truth, imagined and real in a similar fashion as our own heads do!
Oh! But you wanted to know what the novel is all about, and its story or how good it is? Well then, stop looking at this review for an easier way out, just go and read the novel! |
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Rob Shimmin (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
I'm a pushover for unrequited love, so my opinion may be a bit biased, but I no sooner finished Love in the Time of Cholera than it jumped, no, vaulted to the top of my list of the best books I have ever read.
A two-sentence synopsis might read, "As a young man, Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza and is rejected by her. After waiting 51 years for her husband to die, he renews their courtship," and of course this does the book no justice. Nor would a 25-page or even a 100-page summary suffice. Love in the Time of Cholera is one book that cannot possibly be digested without destroying some essential part.
And this is in the spirit of the book. Neither Florentino nor Fernanda can be wholly appreciated, wholly understood except in light of their whole life. Not only does each moment of present in their lives require knowledge of their past before it inspires sympathy, but it requires knowledge of who they will become in order to be presented in its fullest context.
To this end, Marquez presents the intertwined lives of the two characters not chronologically or even as a series of internally chronological segments, but in some conceptual order of his own making that attempts to present each character's entire experience at once, insofar as this is possible. So for example when a character makes a vow to himself, the next scene is a leap into the past to show what memory was going through his mind when he made the vow, why keeping it will be important to him. Then, the narration jumps ten years into the future beyond the vow to show the closest he ever comes to breaking it, to show exactly what circumstances would make him reconsider it and shatter his heart in deciding to keep it, and then, only then, can the story proceed from the point of the vow. Only then can you understand the significance of this vow in the character's life and have your own heart broken every time the vow comes into question. Throughout the book, Marquez constantly bounds through time to show, "What led to this?" and "What will this come to mean?" The presentation does not confuse, except when trying to figure out what age the characters might be in any given scene. It is, quite simply, the order events must be presented in to understand the characters' lives.
The presentation is so masterful, in fact, that you may feel the characters' emotions more strongly than you feel your own. You have only your memories to base your feelings on, but you are slowly acquiring their entire lives. You know not only where they have been, what hopes they had that are being fulfilled or dashed to the ground, but where this moment will take them. In the time of cholera, knowing the future does not spoil it - it makes the present more real.
"More than real" is also a good description of the characters themselves. Florentino and Fernanda are no fairly-tale distillations of human beings, no archetypical personae with everything save this hopeless love or that haughty grandeur pared from them. They are, quite the opposite, so crammed full of human details and failings that it seems at times no human life could be that full of idiosyncracy. Every sentence displays another facet of personality. Florentino has difficulty as a businessman because he cannot keep his business letters free of love poetry. Fernanda smokes her cigarettes locked in the bathroom with the lit end in her mouth because she first had them as a guilty pleasure that no adult knew about. Florentino spends his time waiting out Fernanda's marriage in 622 "long-term liaisons" and countless one-night stands, and then tells her that for her sake, he has kept himself a virgin. You want to be like them not because their experience is at all pleasant, but because you slowly gain the suspicion that even as collections of words on paper, they are more alive than you.
Perhaps this is one of Cholera's messages. Florentino, whose life is based in a half-century of obsession with a woman who has rejected him, who witnesses his succession of abortive relationships, his mother's increasing senility, and the aging of himself and the one he loves, is nonetheless a happy man who wakes up each morning in the absolute confidence that when Fernanda becomes a widow, he will make her happy. Fernanda, who has resigned herself to whatever life brings her, even though it brings her a mostly good marriage, is slowly hollowed out by time until she requires Florentino's experiences and obsession to rejuvenate her. And in the end, it rejuevantes you as the reader, too - it gives courage to love beyond reasonable hope and to live more than any human being can.
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Nicole (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
While enjoying the great ideas presented in this book, I cannot say that I actually much enjoyed the novel itself. Contrasting with most other reviews, the primary theme of this novel is illusion vs reality. The love in this novel is primarily illusion...which is shown by the obsessive love of Florintino. Again, illusion is shown through the entire character of Florintino, with his 622 affairs is a completely unbelievable character. This illusion causes Florintino to decrepitate and to always appear old. THis causes as parallel with Florintino and the land, which is also decrepetating. Eventually, Fermina is able to see thorugh this illusion and see reality... like Urbino is able to see the reality of the land. Several types of love are presented in this story, and it is very difficult to tell which is true love. It is arguable that there is no example of true love between two people in this story... and that the only example of true love and freedom is what Fermina felt at the end of the novel. It is also arguable that Florintino never really loves Fermina, but simply loves the dream of perfection that he created with her (which is evident when he plays the Crowned Goddess at the end). There are several other great ideas that Marquez adds to the story to support these themes. Overall, the novel was interesting, but slightly less than enjoyable. I felt that the overwelming detail often hurt the novel, as the explicit scenes of Florintino and the other women. Even though this fit with the novel, as did the disgusting references to cholera, it did not make for the most pleasent read in the world if you're simply looking to read for enjoyment. Nether-the-less, one must respect Marquez's themes, which are quite advanced. |
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Mark Rose (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
Oh, the wonderful torture of time-worn love. In this masterful book, Marquez's best, he explores the nature of love and the courage it takes to pursue your soul-mate to the end of time, literally. Marquez is banging on all cylinders here, as we follow the protagonist from the earliest stages of budding adolescent desire to full-blown obsession. He cannot live without her, cannot breathe, his bowels betray him. This is serious stuff but in the magical-real world of Marquez, full of visions and rituals and eccentricities, nothing is deathly serious, even death.
It is true that a great book finds you as much as you pick it. This book was on my shelf for years before it found me at a time when I needed to find the purpose of deep love and the courage it takes to pursue it. Marquez's characters are so real that you can converse with them, yet so fanciful that you can only realize them in dreams. I read the book once for pleasure, a second time to marvel at the compact sentence structure that conveys so much and manages never to be burdensome. This is definitely in my top five and may be number one on the all time great novel list. |
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Cassandra Warren (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
When they were both young, in another time, in another world, Florentino Ariza declared his unending love for Fermina Daza. He courted her solely in letters. But Fermina Daza realized her love for Florentino Ariza was only child's folly, and she rejected him in favor of Juvenal Urbino, a respected and renowned doctor above her station. Her marriage to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, initially loveless but unbelievably solid, lasted until her husband's accidental death. Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, never married; he spent his life smelling the "bitter almonds" of unrequited love, wiling away the years in 622 affairs with widows and younger women. Now, fifty years, nine months, and four days later, on the day of her husband's funeral, Florentino Ariza comes back into Fermina Daza's life to reiterate his long-ago oath.
Most of Love in the Time of Cholera takes place in the past, chronicling the lives of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza during the five decades they are apart. While Fermina spends the years of her life taking care of her husband and children, traveling to Europe and thinking about Florentino only occasionally, Florentino breathes for Fermina. He works his way up to the position of president of a prominent riverboat company so he will have a job she respects; he remodels his house in hopes that one day she will have the occasion to be in it. The 622 women with whom he has affairs over the years fulfill only a physical need; they cannot touch the timeless love he feels for Fermina. He suffers from chronic illness throughout his life, for, as it turns out, "the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera."
Other reviewers have put it correctly when they've said that this is a novel about love in all its forms. Love in the Time of Cholera, rather than just a novel about the relationship between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, is a meditation on love, that mysterious force every person on earth wants so desperately to find, feel, be, and be in. Marquez has created a transcendental, timeless masterpiece with this novel, one that brilliantly explores the notion of love, the most powerful of all human emotions.
I've never read anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez before (I know - where have I been?), so I was completely enamored with his rich characterizations and vivid landscapes. You're not just reading about being on a boat on a hot, bug-ridden river, watching victims of cholera float by in the water on either side; you're actually there, feeling the heat, hearing the whine of mosquitoes, smelling the scent of poverty mingled with death. You're with Fermina while she searches the streets for one of Florentino's hidden love letters on the way home from school. Love in the Time of Cholera really is a transport to another world. And Marquez's characters are so imperfect, so pathetic - so real. Marquez's ability to tap into human nature seems effortless, and the beauty of his description and prose is stunning; kudos to Edith Grossman for her brilliant translation of the novel.
It's true that the novel moves very slowly, but I didn't mind. I was totally swept up in Marquez's cholera-ridden world, totally taken with his characters and the prominent role of love in his tale. I guess the best recommendation I can give for this novel is that it made me fall EVEN MORE in love with my husband, which I didn't think was possible. Love in the Time of Cholera is definitely a book for all the hopeless romantics out there; but it's also for the jaded and heartbroken - because if you don't believe in love now, you will after reading it. I guarantee it. |
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Debbie Wesselmann (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-09 00:00>
The title of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel says it all: this is an epic story told with witty, often hilarious, insight about thwarted love. Florentino is passionately and irrevocably in love with Fermina, but when Fermina abruptly calls off their courtship, he is helpless to stop her from marrying a physician. Florentino must endure decades of unrequited love while his beloved constructs a life around another man. But this novel is about so much more than the love Florentino harbors for Fermina. This is about love in all difficult times, through social and political change, through obligation and approaching old age, through betrayal and bold declarations. Fermina's husband Juvenal Urbino is as much a part of this novel as the two lovers.
As always, Garcia Marquez supplies engaging and surreal detail to his story. Only a writer as skilled as he could succeed in exploring all the events leading to the death of a character who is trying to capture his pet parrot. The absurd and fantastical happenings harbor sharp social commentary, elevating this novel from a trifle about love to a masterpiece. As with all of Garcia Marquez's book, this novel is about gritty reality despite the playful, magic realist overlay.
You can feel the enormous satisfaction and fun Garcia Marquez had with this story. He is truly one of the greatest writers to grace the literary landscape. This book is a must-read. |
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1 Total 1 pages 10 items |
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