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Love in the Time of Cholera (Paperback)
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman (Translator)
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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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Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman (Translator)
Publisher: Vintage
Pub. in: October, 2003
ISBN: 140003468X
Pages: 368
Measurements: 7.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00443
Other information: Reprint edition
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- Awards & Credential -
The author is the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1982. His most famous novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude. |
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"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." So begins the narration, in a typically Garcian way. Love in the Time of Cholera tells the tale of the madly infatuated Florentino Ariza, the object of his desire Fermina Daza, and Fermina's emotionally logical husband, Dr. Urbino. Spanning over half a century the love, passion, rejection, desire, and heartache these characters experience is revealed in vividly, breathtaking prose. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's words completely envelope, embracing the heart and soar with the overwhelming sensation of love. The many illustrations of love, love between friends, love of animals, love intended, love impassioned, love unrequited, and eternal love realized, are the essential themes of this stirring book. The cholera plague which reappears several times throughout the tale, serves as an analogy for Florentino's love sickness and as a reminder of the thin line between passionate love and its power to create devestation. Florentino's declaration of "everlasting love" to Fermina, fifty years after she has rejected, him introduces the complex and mysterious quality of both love and of Marquez's book. That Florentino had "six hundred twenty-two entries of long term liaisons" does not alter his belief that he has been faithful to Fermina. Fermina, realizing that her young love for Florentino was "nothing more than an illusion" learns after thirty years to love her husband. This she says "was a time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess… " Dr. Urbino also grows into a relaxed, though somewhat passionless, love with his wife. In the conclusion of the book as the flag of cholera is raised so that Florentino and Fermina can live out their final days together, wistfully suggests that love indeed may be undying.
Target readers:
General readers
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García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1928. He attended the University of Bogotá and went on to become a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador. He later served as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, he is the author of several novels and collections, including No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Innocent Erendira and Other Stories, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The General in His Labyrinth, Strange Pilgrims, and Love and Other Demons.
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From the Publisher:
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermino Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs - yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
With humorous sagacity and consummate craft, García Márquez traces an exceptional half-century story of unrequited love. Though it seems never to be conveniently contained, love flows through the novel in many wonderful guises - joyful, melancholy, enriching, ever surprising.
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IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he had hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him had lost all urgency many years before. The Antillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.
He found the corpse covered with a blanket on the campaign cot where he had always slept, and beside it was a stool with the developing tray he had used to vaporize the poison. On the floor, tied to a leg of the cot, lay the body of a black Great Dane with a snow-white chest, and next to him were the crutches. At one window the splendor of dawn was just beginning to illuminate the stifling, crowded room that served as both bedroom and laboratory, but there was enough light for him to recognize at once the authority of death. The other windows, as well as every other chink in the room, were muffled with rags or sealed with black cardboard, which increased the oppressive heaviness. A counter was crammed with jars and bottles without labels and two crumbling pewter trays under an ordinary light bulb covered with red paper. The third tray, the one for the fixative solution, was next to the body. There were old magazines and newspapers everywhere, piles of negatives on glass plates, broken furniture, but everything was kept free of dust by a diligent hand. Although the air coming through the window had purified the atmosphere, there still remained for the one who could identify it the dying embers of hapless love in the bitter almonds. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had often thought, with no premonitory intention, that this would not be a propitious place for dying in a state of grace. But in time he came to suppose that perhaps its disorder obeyed an obscure determination of Divine Providence.
A police inspector had come forward with a very young medical student who was completing his forensic training at the municipal dispensary, and it was they who had ventilated the room and covered the body while waiting for Dr. Urbino to arrive. They greeted him with a solemnity that on this occasion had more of condolence than veneration, for no one was unaware of the degree of his friendship with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. The eminent teacher shook hands with each of them, as he always did with every one of his pupils before beginning the daily class in general clinical medicine, and then, as if it were a flower, he grasped the hem of the blanket with the tips of his index finger and his thumb, and slowly uncovered the body with sacramental circumspection. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour was completely naked, stiff and twisted, eyes open, body blue, looking fifty years older than he had the night before. He had luminous pupils, yellowish beard and hair, and an old scar sewn with baling knots across his stomach. The use of crutches had made his torso and arms as broad as a galley slave's, but his defenseless legs looked like an orphan's. Dr. Juvenal Urbino studied him for a moment, his heart aching as it rarely had in the long years of his futile struggle against death.
"Damn fool," he said. "The worst was over."
He covered him again with the blanket and regained his academic dignity. His eightieth birthday had been celebrated the year before with an official three-day jubilee, and in his thank-you speech he had once again resisted the temptation to retire. He had said: "I'll have plenty of time to rest when I die, but this eventuality is not yet part of my plans." Although he heard less and less with his right ear, and leaned on a silver-handled cane to conceal his faltering steps, he continued to wear a linen suit, with a gold watch chain across his vest, as smartly as he had in his younger years. His Pasteur beard, the color of mother-of-pearl, and his hair, the same color, carefully combed back and with a neat part in the middle, were faithful expressions of his character. He compensated as much as he could for an increasingly disturbing erosion of memory by scribbling hurried notes on scraps of paper that ended in confusion in each of his pockets, as did the instruments, the bottles of medicine, and all the other things jumbled together in his crowded medical bag. He was not only the city's oldest and most illustrious physician, he was also its most fastidious man. Still, his too obvious display of learning and the disingenuous manner in which he used the power of his name had won him less affection than he deserved.
His instructions to the inspector and the intern were precise and rapid. There was no need for an autopsy; the odor in the house was sufficient proof that the cause of death had been the cyanide vapors activated in the tray by some photographic acid, and Jeremiah de Saint-Amour knew too much about those matters for it to have been an accident. When the inspector showed some hesitation, he cut him off with the kind of remark that was typical of his manner: "Don't forget that I am the one who signs the death certificate." The young doctor was disappointed: he had never had the opportunity to study the effects of gold cyanide on a cadaver. Dr. Juvenal Urbino had been surprised that he had not seen him at the Medical School, but he understood in an instant from the young man's easy blush and Andean accent that he was probably a recent arrival to the city. He said: "There is bound to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the chance one of these days." And only after he said it did he realize that among the countless suicides he could remember, this was the first with cyanide that had not been caused by the sufferings of love. Then something changed in the tone of his voice.
"And when you do find one, observe with care," he said to the intern: "they almost always have crystals in their heart."
Then he spoke to the inspector as he would have to a subordinate. He ordered him to circumvent all the legal procedures so that the burial could take place that same afternoon and with the greatest discretion. He said: "I will speak to the Mayor later." He knew that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour lived in primitive austerity and that he earned much more with his art than he needed, so that in one of the drawers in the house there was bound to be more than enough money for the funeral expenses.
"But if you do not find it, it does not matter," he said. "I will take care of everything."
He ordered him to tell the press that the photographer had died of natural causes, although he thought the news would in no way interest them. He said: "If it is necessary, I will speak to the Governor." The inspector, a serious and humble civil servant, knew that the Doctor's sense of civic duty exasperated even his closest friends, and he was surprised at the ease with which he skipped over legal formalities in order to expedite the burial. The only thing he was not willing to do was speak to the Archbishop so that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour could be buried in holy ground. The inspector, astonished at his own impertinence, attempted to make excuses for him.
"I understood this man was a saint," he said.
"Something even rarer," said Dr. Urbino. "An atheistic saint. But those are matters for God to decide.''
In the distance, on the other side of the colonial city, the bells of the Cathedral were ringing for High Mass. Dr. Urbino put on his half-moon glasses with the gold rims and consulted the watch on its chain, slim, elegant, with the cover that opened at a touch: he was about to miss Pentecost Mass.
In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where not even the ashes of his glory would remain.
On the desk, next to a jar that held several old sea dog's pipes, was the chessboard with an unfinished game. Despite his haste and his somber mood, Dr. Urbino could not resist the temptation to study it. He knew it was the previous night's game, for Jeremiah de Saint-Amour played at dusk every day of the week with at least three different opponents, but he always finished every game and then placed the board and chessmen in their box and stored the box in a desk drawer. The Doctor knew he played with the white pieces and that this time it was evident he was going to be defeated without mercy in four moves. "If there had been a crime, this would be a good clue," Urbino said to himself. "I know only one man capable of devising this masterful trap." If his life depended on it, he had to find out later why that indomitable soldier, accustomed to fighting to the last drop of blood, had left the final battle of his life unfinished.
At six that morning, as he was making his last rounds, the night watchman had seen the note nailed to the street door: Come in without knocking and inform the police. A short while later the inspector arrived with the intern, and the two of them had searched the house for some evidence that might contradict the unmistakable breath of bitter almonds. But in the brief minutes the Doctor needed to study the unfinished game, the inspector discovered an envelope among the papers on the desk, addressed to Dr. Juvenal Urbino and sealed with so much sealing wax that it had to be ripped to pieces to get the letter out…
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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. |
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. |
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. |
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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