Product Description

In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2382 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-05
• Released on: 2007-10-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The ironic vision and luminous evocation of South America that have distinguished Garcia Marquez's Nobel Prize-winning fiction since his landmark work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, persist in this turn-of-the-century chronicle of a unique love triangle. It is a fully mature novel in scope and perspective, flawlessly translated, as rich in ideas as in humanity. The illustrious and meticulous Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his proud, stately wife Fermina Daza, respectively past 80 and 70, are in the autumn of their solid marriage as the drama opens on the suicide of the doctor's chess partner. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a disabled photographer of children, chooses death over the indignities of old age, revealing in a letter a clandestine love affair, on the "fringes of a closed society's prejudices." This scenario not only heralds Urbino's demise soon afterwhen he falls out of a mango tree in an attempt to catch an escaped parrotbut brilliantly presages the novel's central themes, which are as concerned with the renewing capacity of age as with an anatomy of love. We meet Florentino Ariza, more antihero than hero, a mock Don Juan with an undertaker's demeanor, at once pathetic, grotesque and endearing, when he seizes the memorably unseemly occasion of Urbino's funeral to reiterate to Fermina the vow of love he first uttered more than 50 years before. With the fine detailing of a Victorian novel, the narrative plunges backward in time to reenact their earlier, youthful courtship of furtive letters and glances, frustrated when Fermina, in the light of awaking maturity, realizes Florentino is an adolescent obsession, and rejects him. With his uncanny ability to unearth the extraordinary in the commonplace, Garcia Marquez smoothly interweaves Fermina's and Florentino's subsequent histories. Enmeshed in a bizarre string of affairs with ill-fated widows while vicariously conducting the liaisons of others via love poems composed on request, Florentino feverishly tries to fill the void of his unrequited passion. Meanwhile, Fermina's marriage suffers vicissitudes but endures, affirming that marital love can be as much the product of art as is romantic love. When circumstances both comic and mystical offer Fermina and Florentino a second chance, during a time in their lives that is often regarded as promising only inevitable degeneration toward death, Garcia Marquez beautifully reveals true love's soil not in the convention of marriage but in the simple, timeless rituals that are its cement. 100,000 first printing; first serial to the New Yorker; BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr. Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death. In substance and style not as fantastical, as mythologizing, as the previous works, this is a compelling exploration of the myths we make of love. Highly recommended. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
“This shining and heartbreaking novel may be one of the greatest love stories ever told.” --The New York Times Book Review

“A love story of astonishing power…. Altogether extraordinary.” --Newsweek
 
“Brilliant, provocative…magical…splendid writing.” --Chicago Tribune
 
“Beguiling, masterly storytelling…. García Márquez writes about love as saving grace, the force that makes life worthwhile.” --Newsday
  
“A sumptuous book…[with] major themes of love, death, the torments of memory, the inexorability of old age.” --The Washington Post Book World

Customer Reviews

one of the best books I have ever read; a story about love and its forms.
I had wanted to read this book for a long time, but when I finally checked it out of the library, I put off reading it. At the time I was reading a very long, 600+ page book, and I when I finally started reading Love in the time of Cholera, I was put off by its beginning, which to me seemed to have no point. However, I kept at it, and soon I was hooked.
The story occurs over a 50 year period, starting at the end and then going back to beginning to explain how things got there. In the late 1800's, in an unspecialized South American city, a boy and girl fall in love. However, their love is never consumated, and they barely speak, choosing instead to correspond with letters. Finally the girl chooses to marry a rich doctor- but the boy never gives up, waiting for the day Fermenia's husband will die. The author's style kept me going, as his writing style helped me imagine the story perfectly and beatifully. I loved this book!

Love in many forms
My husband went into a bookstore to get me a book for our first anniversary and requested a love story. He was told that Love in the Time of Cholera was the best love story in existence, and subsequently brought me a lovely hardback edition. It is certainly my favorite work by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, perhaps because it is short on the magical realism that permeates his other novels. Marquez has a gift of taking unlikely characters and situations and turning them into stories that ring distinctly true. There are several types of love in this novel: childish infatuations that dissolve or degenerate into obsession, love that begins as dislike and matures into dependence, friendships, and many sexual pairings of varying emotional involvement. Marquez also describes the Magdalena river with such love that I long to see it, an impossible wish as even during the timeframe of the novel it no longer exits as it once did.

A story of love and life...
Have you ever "carried a torch" for someone or knew someone who did? This book explores taking this type of an obsession to new extremes. I know it's a book about all kinds of love (romantic, illicit, parental, etc.) but the main thrust of the book is the unrequitted love of a man for a woman. It's a 52 year plus story of a man who has 'gone loco' for a woman. You will feel contempt, sorrow, horror, amusement, and pity for him. Then you will feel contempt, sorrow, horror, amusement and pity for her. Why can't they get together? Why does she turn against him so abruptly? Why doesn't he give up? Why, why, why. It's a book full of questions. You will get the sense that a life is being wasted and in a constant state of turmoil. You will then get the sense that another life is moving toward fulfillment and peace of mind. All of these feelings will culminate near the end of the book. That's when you'll feel happy and sad for both of them and when you'll feel that life - their life and your life - is pretty much so fast moving it's a blur. This book is like that. All of us are caught up in this too fast, too short life. Enjoy every minute of it and take in all the details along the way. That's the message Marquez sent me. Thanks for an incredible ride!