Books: “Love in the time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A wonderful tale of life spent on love against the scenery and heat of the Carribeans. Set almost casually during the time of rampant civil war and the cholera epidemic – for despite the title, cholera plays almost little effect on the characters. But as a result of the unrequited love that spans half a century, even Florentino Ariza’s mother mistakes his heart’s ailment with the disease. Marquez teases the idea that the two words are synonymous; the title could have just as easily been “cholera in the time of love,” which is precisely how the story ended, or began at last. Is love an epidemic? Or something that binds daily habit? It has the strange quality of being ephemeral yet lasting at once.
Garcia Marquez’s prose is lyrical, and breezy – to the point that tragedies and perversions alike can be received with an easy shrug of a shoulder. Horrific misfortunes are told in half a sentence, and grief that follows, another half sentence more; his tales are chronicles of passion, softened by memory and time.

“At eighty-one years of age he had enough lucidity to realize that he was attached to this world by a few slender threads that could break painlessly with a simple change of position while he slept, and if he did all he could to keep those threads intact, it was because of his terror of not finding God in the darkness of Death.”

“At least once a week he ended the evening with a little night bird, as he called them, one of the many who sold emergency love in a transient hotel for sailors.”

“…Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: ‘My heart has more rooms than a whore-house.”

“They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”

Feb12-18