Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

But cholera, as Thomas Pynchon pointed out in his New York Times review of the book, has two meanings in Spanish: ‘In their city, throughout a turbulent half-century, death has proliferated everywhere, both as el colera, the fatal disease that sweeps through in terrible intermittent epidemics, and as la colera, defined as choler or anger, which taken to its extreme becomes warfare.

This much - Urbino’s death and Ariza’s proposal - is covered in the long opening chapter, after which we flash back more than half a century to the time of cholera itself. Understandably, she tells him to get lost.

In the meantime, far from being defeated by the seemingly irreversible obstacle of Fermina’s marriage, Florentino views it as a temporary setback, settles (but never settles down) and waits: he waits - as we are reminded on several occasions - 51 years, 9 months and 4 days, before proposing to Fermina at the funeral following Dr Urbino’s death in a fall from a ladder while chasing an irksome parrot up a mango tree.

The doctor, returning from Paris where he has worked with the leading physicians of the day, first meets Fermina during the time of cholera, when she is suspected of having the disease (it turns out to be only a mild intestinal infection).ĭr Juvenal Urbino, the scion of one of the city’s great families, rises to even greater eminence for bringing the epidemic under control, imposing strict rules of cleanliness and quarantine for the infected. Its premise is the unfashionable concept of eternal love, involving a trio of characters: the eighteen-year old Florentino Ariza falls for the schoolgirl Fermina Daza, and courts her throughout her adolescence, before eventually being ditched when, at the age of nineteen, Fermina marries the far more eligible and somewhat older Dr Juvenal Urbino. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a young person’s novel, written in an explosion of creative energy over eighteen months and a million cigarettes, and Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel of maturity, or at the very least, of middle age. Looking back now, I can see that my reaction said more about me than about the book itself. I was still in thrall to the García Márquez of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and while acknowledging the meticulous skill of its composition, was confused that he had written what seemed like a nineteenth century novel. I never fully appreciated Love in the Time of Cholera when it first appeared, back in the 1980s. In the second instalment of this series, Richard Gwyn draws parallels between contagion literature and the coronavirus pandemic, tracing ever pressing facts through fiction in the form of Gabriel García Márquez ’s Love in the Time of Cholera ( (trans.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez