Love in the Time of Cholera : Gabriel Garcia Marquez

                                                       Image Credit : Nishitak 

I vaguely remember reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's classic One Hundred Years of Solitude almost a decade ago when I was doing my Masters in Literature. I think I liked the book, or so I remember. Then, last year, I picked up Marquez's universally acclaimed Love in the Time of Cholera. I went through 100 pages of it, and then for some inexplicable reason, abandoned it. But this year has been a good reading year for me in the sense that I have not abandoned any books. So I returned to Love again.

And I discovered again what a masterful writer Marquez is! Reading him is almost a visceral experience. I could sense the care that the writer has lavished on his words. Each sentence is like a literary banquet. There we have poor Florentino Ariza, fresh as an adolescent, and passionately in love with the beautiful Fermina Daza. Their brief but tempestuous love affair leaves a mark on Ariza's heart, so much so when Fermina rejects her love as just an illusion, he marks down the days when he can be with her again. That time comes nearly fifty years later when Fermina's husband Dr Juvental Urbino dies while trying to rescue his pet parrot from the mango tree. But does he regain Fermina?

Love in the Time of Cholera is a beautiful meditation on the mad obsessions in love, its many faces and the ruin and rise it can simultaneously carve in our lives. There is also a portrayal of a difficult yet long marriage - between the good doctor Urbino and Fermina. I remember this passage when Fermina recounts what Urbino's response was when in a height of desperation, she shouted at him : "You don't understand how unhappy I am." Her husband's response? "Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability." The book is studded with gems like these. Later, when Fermina looks back on her marriage, she muses thus:

She always felt as if her life had been lent to her by her husband: she was absolute monarch of a vast empire of happiness, which had been built by him and for him alone. She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anyone else in the world, but only for his own sake: she was in his holy service.

Yet, their was a beautiful marriage, not without its trials, but life somehow redeems itself. And what about Florentino? I, strangely, did not like his character. There was something vaguely bordering on the psychopathic obsessive in him that put me off - and towards the end, he has no problem lying to Fermina that he remains a virgin for her, even though he has probably more than 600 affairs by that time. Yet he remains the force of the book. A man built of love and breathing on its crumbling edifice.

Although I enjoyed reading the book, the long-drawn out end was a little bit tedious to my taste. But then, Marquez has paced the novel well. Maybe it was just my frazzled nerves that wanted to reach the end, an end which was predictable, but an end that was worth the book.

Verdict : Deserves its status as a cult classic.


Rating : 4/5