“Love in the Time of Cholera is a love story told in a degree so timeless and real yet so magical and lyrical it sings in your heart for a long, long time. In this novel, Gabriel Garcia Marquez answers two simple questions about love: What would you do for love? Everything. How long will you wait? Forever. Oh how he answers those questions so well, deliciously, perfectly, comically, madly, innocently well.
Florentino Ariza is love, who, after more than half a century of fidelity and everlasting love (not to mention a voluminous record of momentary liaisons with other women), has waited for that very moment to be with his one and only true love, Fermina Daza, his crowned goddess – two withering flowers, two old love birds celebrating that unreachable love along the rivers of the Carribean, amidst the salty perspiration, the breeze of the sea which cradles steamboats which in turn carries soldiers, a civil war which has been alive in the city for a hundred years, a city teeming with the philosophies and secrets of whores and an unending tally of death tolls from a turn-of-the-century disease – two couples who sang and resounded the glorious and amusing Love in the Time of Cholera.
Love in the Time of Cholera, for all its greatness and richness of life and love so real and alive that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the master novelist of the present time has tricked the mind of the reader in two ways. First, Love in the Time of Cholera is richly detailed not just with the structural setting, but as well as the actions, the emotions, the culture in the book that the reader will immediately be ported into that world while reading it, while taking him a few seconds time to go back again to his real world once he has postponed reading it. The second trick is that the characters, particularly the trio of Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino will be talked about during conversations with other readers, as if they were not fictitious, as if they were really alive somewhere near them, but indeed the trio are alive in their hearts.
This novel must be read by all. All who are in love and all who are in need of love. Be taken away into the novel’s world, in the novel’s time.
Well, we all wish for that single day to spend with the one we love. And whatever the kind of love we are experiencing right now, it is undoubtedly, in its very core and essence, love. Simply as it is.”
