Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez
The recap
In a sultry Caribbean port city around the turn of the twentieth century, a shy young telegraph clerk named Florentino Ariza glimpses Fermina Daza through a sewing-room window and falls for her completely. Their courtship unfolds through a flurry of secret letters, until her ambitious father intervenes and life pulls the pair in very different directions. Fermina goes on to a respectable marriage with Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a cultured physician waging war on cholera; Florentino goes on waiting, nursing a devotion that lasts for decades and that he tries to console with a long string of affairs. García Márquez follows both lives across half a century of civil wars, river steamers, epidemics and aging bodies, asking whether love is a fever, a habit or a lifelong act of stubbornness. Lush, funny and often unsentimental, it is a love story that takes old age as seriously as youth.
Why read it
For readers who believe love can be patient to the point of absurdity, and for anyone who wants a romance as interested in wrinkles and regrets as in first glances.
Fun facts
- 01
García Márquez drew on his own parents' courtship: his father was a telegraphist whose romance with his mother was fiercely opposed by her father.
- 02
The novel was first published in Spanish in 1985 as El amor en los tiempos del cólera, and Edith Grossman's English translation followed in 1988.
- 03
The famously reclusive Thomas Pynchon reviewed the English translation for The New York Times Book Review in 1988.
- 04
Oprah Winfrey made it her book club pick in October 2007, just ahead of a film adaptation directed by Mike Newell and starring Javier Bardem.
