Book Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love in the Time of Cholera (1985)

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Welcome back!

In this blog post, I will be reviewing Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (referred to herein as Love), first published in Spanish in 1985 before its English translation was published in 1988. Love is an epic - well - love story between two characters, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, and a story about growing old.

Ariza's passion for Daza, nurtured when the two were teenagers, never wanes, and while the manifestations of his devotion to Daza change over time, the intensity with which he feels love for her remains constant. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester (Jane Eyre); Tess and Angel (Tess of the D'Urbervilles); Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy (Pride and Prejudice): while still epics, these are stories of young people falling in love with one another and the attendant dramas that unfold as one lover is spurned, or lies, or cheats, or betrays, or boils in jealousy. In short, 'passion' in the context of love is treated as the domain of the young. But Marquez's love story flourishes only as the lovers near the end of their lives, and it is a tale of passion tempered with the grace of old age, making it unique in this respect.

Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo features a protagonist reuniting with his lover later in life, but it is more a novel dealing in vengeance than a love story. (And Love in the Time of Cholera is, first and foremost, a love story.) So in this narrow respect, Love in the Time of Cholera distinguishes itself.

The plot proceeds, at least initially, as motivated principally by implication and subsequent denial. Which is to say that Marquez implies the import of a character (for example, Dr. Juvenal Urbino) or theme or relationship, and then denies the reader the assumptions they form based thereon. For example, Marquez denies the assumed import of Dr. Urbino, after it is revealed early in the book (but late in the chronology; the story begins more or less with Urbino's death) that the character dies after falling from a ladder while trying to locate his parrot. It is an interesting way of carrying on a storyline, and to some extent mirrors the themes explored in the novel, such as whether and to what extent anyone can ever truly predict or prepare for the future, and whether and to what extent people have control over their own fate. Dr. Urbino, who follows a strict diet and health regimen, dies in a highly unforeseen manner, and the fate of the characters is driven more by external factors than force of will.

Cholera is a bacterial infection which was, in the period of time during which the novel takes place, poorly understood and difficult to treat; it might have felt at the time as though death from cholera was divinely ordained and impossible to prevent. In this context, the characters as being victims, or otherwise at the whim, of circumstance, makes sense.

It is a passionate world that Marquez creates, and his world is composed of people tormented by love and heartbreak; by obsession. When Ariza first falls in love with Daza, he forms an image of her in his head and falls in love with the mental projection of his own creation: "Little by little he idealized her, endowing her with improbable virtues and imaginary sentiments, and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her." (56 (references to page numbers herein shall be to the 2003 Vintage Books edition of Love in the Time of Cholera).) He writes letters to her, and makes music for her, and Daza's impressions of Ariza, in turn, are thus formed based on what she can see from a distance.

But years later, the two meet at a market when Daza is seventeen and Ariza is in his early twenties, and Daza realizes that she has made a terrible mistake in loving him. The man with whom she was in love existed only in her mind, and she calls off the engagement she had agreed to by letter. Ariza is crushed, but he channels his passion into his work and into the superficial affairs he has with other women. As "life obliges [men] over and over to give birth to themselves" (165), Ariza defines himself based on the women he meets and the love for Daza which does not fade. He becomes a powerful man, but his essential self does not change.

And throughout, Love is a mellifluous tale of solitude; of people whose companions are their thoughts and ideas and passions. For Ariza, at least, his solitude is a prism, and the refracted world which he views through this prism is a poetic one. "[T]he silence was diaphanous in the four o'clock heat, and through the bedroom window one could see the outline of the old city with the afternoon sun at its back, its golden domes, its sea in flames all the way to Jamaica." (179.) While Ariza pines after Daza, the latter also questions her decision to marry Dr. Urbino - a smart, well-dressed, wealthy, and worldly man - when she had little reason to truly prefer him to Ariza, who she had rebuffed and whose heart she had broken.

Because in spite of all of the goods that Dr. Urbino provided for her, those furnishments "were not love, and [her] doubts increased her confusion, because she was also not convinced that love was really what she most needed to her live." (205.) She is practical, as a woman with little opportunity to achieve actualization on her own must necessarily be, and she sees her husband (the practical choice) and Ariza (the passionate lover) as not only contesting one another for her attention, but she also views the host of traits that each man represents as competing with one another for primacy within her. Her conflict is maddening, and solitude pains her, even as it sustains Ariza: "[s]he was depressed by the solitude, the cemetery garden, the squandering of time in the enormous, windowless rooms. During the endless nights she felt herself losing her mind, as the madwomen screamed in the asylum next door." (207.) The comparison is made directly several times in and around this passage.

Too, married life bores her: "Life in the world, which had caused her so much uncertainty before she was familiar with it, was nothing more than a system of atavistic contracts, banal ceremonies, preordained words, with which people entertained each other in society in order not to commit murder." (211.) And she grows profoundly unhappy, even as she begins to more deeply love her husband (Dr. Urbino) and accept and find value in her role as wife, mother, and woman. (See, e.g., 212 ("[I]t permitted her to realize the extreme of unhappiness she had reached.").) This condition worsens when she realized she had become little more than a "deluxe servant" (221) in spite of the trappings of happiness which surrounded her - a doting family, wealth, peace, etc.

As stated above, Dr. Urbino dies at the outset of the book, and the passage of the story reaches this point for the second time roughly three-quarters of the way through the novel.

Ariza professes his love for Daza on the same day as Dr. Urbino's funeral, he is cast out, and then the two once again fall into each other's orbits. And on a boat ride, the two finally get together in a satisfying end to the novel. Memories plague the two as they revel in their happily-ever-after, and the past feels present still. "Florentina Ariza still had dim memories of the journey of his youth, and in dazzling flashes of lightning the sight of the river called them back to life as if they had happened yesterday." (328.) And Daza listens to him, and they share with each other the contents of the fifty years during which they had been apart while "exchang[ing] unhurried kisses ... [and] enjoy[ing] the rapture of caresses without the pitfall of impatience." (338.) They waited a lifetime to be together, and now, at the end of their lives, they could afford to take their time. I am omitting much excellent writing and storyline to get here, but I leave that for you, reader, to find for yourself.

Love in the Time of Cholera is a vindication of the impossible love story, and it is a champion of the youthful promise that love will not fade or spoil or materially change through the passage of time. While most people's considered judgments would find such a view to be naive, this perspective ultimately triumphs and is presented in the best possible light. The naivete of love, the trials and tribulations of love: these are not new themes explored in the novel form. But Marquez takes these themes and elaborates upon them so adeptly that a gorgeously eloquent and singularly beautiful story is the end result.

While not so good as Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera is nonetheless one of the best love stories out there, and the prose is second-to-none. I arbitrarily give it an 8.5 out of 10.

Thanks for reading, and, as always, I welcome reader engagement! Please write to me at will.b.eaton.00@gmail.com to discuss this book, other books, writing, or any other subject matter you believe would be of interest to me.

(Main Image: Cover of Love in the Time of Cholera as published in 2003 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc.)