Love in the time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love in the time of Cholera is actually a novel about love in all times in all of our lives. How one makes compromises in the marriage and still finds something to hold it which is sometimes love and sometimes just convenience, and how sometime a distant and unacceptable notion becomes the realization of true love is how the story about life of Fermina Daza is depicted by Marquez in his this classic love story. As I began to read and had read about half of the book, I felt that the story was going to be a tragedy about the longings of Florentino Ariza who waits all his life for his lover to love him and would die without seeing that day but Marquez apparently preferred the happy ending over the sad one. He started with the marital and ended with the post-marital and all in a happy way. Every character was accepted with his/her flaws and things stood as they are. He has basically dissected love here in all its forms : adulterous, marital, post marital, unrequited, prositutional, unconditional, conditional, in old age, in young age, pedophilic, happy, sad, platonic, multi nodal(with many people at the same time). Most of these we witness through the life of Ariza. He has committed almost all sexual perversities and yet in the end he stands absolved of all his indulgences and is instead showered in the ideal love of old age. It is just as young lovers picture it often about their becoming old together and still possessing  the same passion which they nurture in their young hearts.

The title was the cause which misled me in predicting the end. I believed that either the love would finally develop between the doctor and his wife when there is a cholera epidemic, or Florentino would die of cholera and then Fermina would realize that she loved him or Fermina would die of cholera and then the two men would realize how much they had loved her in their own ways. In any case, there had to be a cholera thing related to one of the main protagonists but it was not so.

Anyway, the book was good and moving and more to the tastes of the people who like mushy love stories. As for me the love stories do not move me as much specially the ones where there is a lot of sacrifice and devotion. Although physically, Ariza violates all codes of physical loyalty and devotion yet he is religiously devoted to the one person he loves. His character is like the typical romeo who writes love verses and rhetorical letters and performs acts of irrational and unnatural manner. To me he seems the idealized romeo like characters that girls often find in their adolescence but for Florentino, this characteristic extends forever. He is a much bathetic character contrasted with the somewhat austere nature of Fermina Daza who is a resolute lady. In a sense, Marquez has done the reversal of the roles of men and women lovers’ stereotypes. Whereas, women are shown to be more in control of themselves taking the love when they want, rejecting it when they dont , placing their own conditions for it, unabashed about their desires and passions, and feel free to commit adultery the men do so but not without a weaknss. Both Urbino and Ariza and also Lorenzo Daza have been shown somewhat weak and heavily dependent on others when it comes to emotional control. Infidelity and illegitimate relationships are not something occassional, they are commonplace in the novel.

All in all, it is a rich novel painted about love with the backdrop of war and cholera. All kinds of griefs are shown with the possibility of finding love ( like unrequited love finally being rewarded, widows finding happiness after their marital virginity, Hildebranda Sanchez finding joy in the life of others when it is absent in hers, Transito Ariza finding it in her son’s) and so on. In the end, the book epitomizes love and ends on a note of hope. A good reading but then Marquez in not counted among the best for no reasons.