"Love In The Time of Cholera" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez ****1/2

Love in the Time of Cholera

By
Gabriel Garcia Márquez

Translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman


The difficulty of converting literature into a movie is that you can film the story, but could never capture the elegance of language that is prevalent in the manuscript. The obvious inadequacy of celluloid in trying to portray such poetic descriptions as:

“But Angeles Alfaro left as she had come, with her tender sex and her sinner’s cello, on an ocean liner that flew the flag of oblivion and all that remained of her on the moonlit roofs was a fluttered farewell with a white handkerchief like a solitary sad dove on the horizon, as if she were a verse from the Poetic Festival.”

This Nobel Prizing winning author part poet, part writer, part literary magician dramatically weaves the lives of three main characters in a book of revelations about youth, love, marriage, persistence, aging and death.

The story line is quite simple. At a very youthful time in life, Fermina Daza captivates Florentino Ariza an iconoclastic individual of extremely unusual character and unlikely physical appearance. Although they have no opportunity to speak, she is captivated by his dedication and the endless amount of letters that he sends to her. Ultimately she is distracted by life and discards him eventually marrying a physician who commands high regard both in the social and political communities. Late in life he dies. Fermina and Florentino are reunited in a most unusual elderly relationship.

The story is captivating. The language is hypnotizing. The imagery is magical.

The philosophic portrayal of old age is incarcerated in such definitive imagery that words become tangible and concepts become substance.

“There was no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.”

“…she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory…”

“…most fatal diseases had their own specific odor, but that none was as specific as old age.”

“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to his artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
“Florentino Ariza, on the other hand, faced the insidious snares of old age with savage temerity…”

One of the impressive aspects of Marquez’s style is the imaginative use of language to portray the most simple of life events.

“…and, at last he gave into the spell of habit.”

“…reluctant to confess his hatred of animals…He said that people who loved them to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.”

“…smelling a secret garden in his urine that had been purified by lukewarm asparagus.”

“No not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing. His strange nature, which someone once praised in a speech as lucid demential, allowed him to see in an instant what no one else ever saw…”

“…it was a tangible look that touched him as if it were a finger.”

“…and then all they could do was to use sex as if it were a bandit’s knife, and put it to the throat of the first man they passed on the street.”

“…and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.”

“The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”

“…as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age.”

“Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”

“…flowers painted lunatic colors.”


Although he waited a lifetime to reunite with Fermina, Florentino was perpetually promiscuous. He never views himself as being inappropriate because his love for her is unswerving and unending. He legitimizes his actions with the quote: “…their musketeers’ motto: Unfaithful but not disloyal.”


The author chronicles his pursuit and enjoyment of sensuality throughout the lifetime he spends waiting to re-establish a relationship with Fermina. From the descriptions of his activities it is obvious that he is not bored, but it is more an expression of being lost.

“He persuaded her to let them be observed while they made love, to replace the conventional missionary position with the bicycle on the sea, or the chicken on the grill, or the drawn-and-quartered angel, and they almost broke their necks when the cords snapped as the were trying to devise something new in a hammock.”

This tale that is revealed in a non-chronological, but logical, style dramatically investigates the power of a youthful love obsession that continues and persists until death. It contains the elements that make a read intoxicating including humor, imagery, eroticism, character, imagination, human strength and fragility.

And an added bonus of the book is the translator’s use of an extensive vocabulary. These are words that you will not find in the Reader’s Digest (or the movie version of the same title). You have to love the language:

Gerontophobia
Daguerreotypes
Profligate
Sibylline
Lacustrine
Passementerie
Succubus
Chimerical