Love in the Time of Cholera

Yesterday I finished Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera, a charming, meandering love story that spans the course of a lifetime.

As a teenager, Florentino Ariza spots a beautiful girl walking to school one day. Being the passionate sort, he falls instantly in love with her. They begin a tempestuous affair, which ends quite suddenly when the ever-practical Fermina Daza determines that he really isn't the right sort of man for her, and marries someone else.

What follows is a rambling dialogue of their life experiences, both separately and together. In a slow and steady flow, Marquez reveals their loves and hates, examines the inner workings of marriage, and the way a person can spend his life in 622 sexual affairs and yet reserve his love for one remote, unobtainable woman.

She could not conceive of a husband better than hers had been, and yet when she recalled their life she found more difficulties than pleasures, too many mutual misunderstandings, useless arguments, unresolved angers. Suddenly she sighed: 'It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.'

Like the lives of his characters, Marquez' writing style is a slow meandering through a variety of topics. I was thirty pages in before the story actually seemed to be going anywhere at all. There is a tendency throughout the novel to introduce an event (a conversation, for example), and then spend the next chapter explaining how the characters came to be having said conversation. I usually find this annoying beyond belief, but Marquez really makes it work. Everything in Love in the Time of Cholera contributes to the overall whole- a slow unfolding of life and love.