2 of 2 members found this review helpful.
“Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is about a love triangle that persists for over half a century. The main story follows the lives of the three characters as they try to figure out what love actually is.
Normally, I like to say *something* nice about the books I read, and this post is no exception. But I was at a lovely little party last weekend talking to a young lady who was also reading LTC, and we both reached the same conclusion: It's hard to get into. And I for one kept falling asleep while reading. Every time I cracked open the page--poof!--out like a light.
Granted, this may have been a function of finals week frenzy, but whatever the cause, I took to reading it while imbibing mugfuls of espresso-laced hot chocolate. Yum!
So what does LTC do well--apart from the great title--that makes this literary litany of love so...loved?
Lots of time passes in this novel. LOTS of time. Two of the three main characters are barely adults when they meet, and they're in old age when they meet again. GGM faces the task of making "time passing" feel authentic.
To capture how time slows, speeds, limps, lumbers, and leaps, LTC is told in a controlled ramble--anecdotes attach one to the other with invisible stitching. Most of the anecdotes are amusing, mundane stories that manage to take small ordinary dramas and turn them into moments worthy of Italian opera. At the end of the book, all those hundreds of anecdotes--some lengthy and strong, some little and stretchy--come together like a ball made of rubber bands, so that by looking at each character's life in micro-detail, the result is that his/her lifespan feels like one big unified, if not slightly uneven, lump. Which I think may be a pretty accurate way of writing time.
It's an interesting way to organize a book as huge as LTC. Will everyone like it? I don't know. ”