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3.71 AVERAGE
3.71 AVERAGE
Like the movie Raw (2016), this is a 5 star experience that I do not recommend and would not wish on anybody.
Many aspects of this story and it’s characters are problematic- often to extremes that gave me pause. It does, however, take immense talent to turn a story about men who are disrespectful assholes and in the protagonists case, also a rapist and pedophile, into a gorgeous & meandering romance.
The rich description, even when it’s of dead animals, streets ranks with disease, and unfiltered terrors of old age, is unparalleled and truly transporting. The romance is sweeping and grand, and though it often borders on toxic, also speaks deeply about delusions of love and the lies we tell ourselves.
I’ll probably be conflicted about how much I love this novel for the rest of my life.
Many aspects of this story and it’s characters are problematic- often to extremes that gave me pause. It does, however, take immense talent to turn a story about men who are disrespectful assholes and in the protagonists case, also a rapist and pedophile, into a gorgeous & meandering romance.
The rich description, even when it’s of dead animals, streets ranks with disease, and unfiltered terrors of old age, is unparalleled and truly transporting. The romance is sweeping and grand, and though it often borders on toxic, also speaks deeply about delusions of love and the lies we tell ourselves.
I’ll probably be conflicted about how much I love this novel for the rest of my life.
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Nunca había leído un libro de Gabriel García Márquez y para ser sincero, no me encanto. Es una historia muy romántica y muy trágica. Obviamente fue escrita hace muchísimo tiempo y los ambientes eran distintos a los de ahora, aunque el autor logra ubicarnos y describe excelentemente los lugares. Me encanta su forma de escribir, algo en redada yendo de atrás hacia adelante en el tiempo y contando historias de otros personajes. Sin embargo creo que la historia se alargó más de lo que debía. En ciertas partes se vuelve algo repetitivo el sufrimiento de Florentino Ariza. Es muy chapado a la antigua el romance y eso me encanto, la forma en la que se intenta cortejar a las mujeres y cómo influye el permiso de los padres sobre las relaciones.
Es una bonita historia en donde nos muestra cómo el amor no siempre es un camino feliz aunque a veces suele tener un buen final.
Es una bonita historia en donde nos muestra cómo el amor no siempre es un camino feliz aunque a veces suele tener un buen final.
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
emotional
funny
reflective
relaxing
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
A classic for a reason, all the more special having experienced the magic of Cartagena
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.”
“Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.”
“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
“Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can, because these things don't last your whole life.”
“Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.”
challenging
emotional
slow-paced
slow-paced
DNF. 3/4 finished mostly disinterested in the entire plot; not impressed with the writing, when the main character (in his 50’s) determined that he was “in love” (though he is still pining for his one true love throughout the book and only screwing every woman while waiting for her husband to die-though she blew him off in no uncertain terms) with his new 14-yo ward and began very clearly grooming her. I quit!
Love in the Time of Cholera features a richly distinctive setting – a provincial city on Colombia's Caribbean coastline during the late 19th and early 20th centuries – and at least three vibrant, intriguing characters. García Márquez applies a great deal of imaginative detail to both setting and characters; this is responsible for much of the novel’s charm, especially early on. Thematic strengths include the recurring synecdoche of love-as-illness. I was struck by a relatively inconspicuous passage in which Dr. Juvenal Urbino muses upon the public health measures which have transformed cholera in the region from epidemic to endemic; I like to think of Love in the Time of Cholera as an exploration of the many forms love can take along a spectrum between the two. The novel also features some quite exquisite writing about age and aging, especially in its final fifty or so pages. It is important, I think, that when Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza come to love one another in their mutual senescence, they discover that their love in fact has nothing to do with nostalgia or memory; the frenzied infatuation of their youth which haunted them for so many decades has become totally irrelevant.
I found Love in the Time of Cholera least compelling in its mid-section, recounting the decades between Fermina’s marriage to Dr. Urbino and Dr. Urbino’s eventual death. While there are compelling moments to be found throughout, the overall effect of this part of the story is, in essence, a bit of a spiritual and thematic muddle. I was not convinced that Florentino would have developed, over these years of obsessive, disordered love, the type of spiritual maturity and ethical poise García Márquez attributes to him at the novel’s conclusion. Indeed, the unrequited love Florentino retains for Fermina sometimes felt like a merely cursory backdrop to the meandering, unresolved series of events. I did not object to the dark turns the story sometimes takes – it all seems like appropriate ground to cover in a story framed by metaphors of disease, aging, and war – except in that I was not always sure this complicated material had much bearing on the novel’s thematic vision or its narrative resolution.
Favorite quotes (page numbers from 1st Vintage International Edition, 2003):
“Dr. Urbino was reluctant to confess his hatred of animals, which he disguised with all kinds of scientific inventions and philosophical pretexts that convinced many, but not his wife. He said that people who loved them to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ” (21)
“...with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia…” (87)
“Florentino Ariza endured the hardships of the journey with the mineral patience that had brought sorrow to his mother and exasperation to his friends” (142)
“‘The trouble,” his uncle said to him, “is that without river navigation there is no love.’” (168)
“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)
“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy” (224)
“...the forbidden precincts of her intimacy…” (228)
“Death has no sense of the ridiculous” (286)
“The purified memory of her husband, no longer an obstacle in her daily actions, in her private thoughts, in her simplest intentions, became a watchful presence that guided but did not hinder her” (299)
“They had seen each other for what they were: two old people, ambushed by death, who had nothing in common except the memory of an ephemeral past that was no longer theirs but belonged to two young people who vanished and who could have been their grandchildren” (305)
“...that the feverish excitement of twenty had been something very noble, very beautiful, but it had not been love” (317)
“Fermina Daza sat motionless until dawn, thinking about Florentino Ariza, not as the desolate sentinel in the little Park of the Evangels, whose memory did not awaken even a spark of nostalgia in her, but as he was now, old and lame, but real” (330)
Para mi un libro de sentimientos encontrados. Lo odio pero tambien me fascinó.
Se me hizo absurdamente largo, pero cuando lo terminé quería más.
Es una historia que sucede en un contexto puntual, muy distinto al actual, y que está dibujado de tal manera que te hace viajar y adentrarte en lo más profundo de su mundo.
No estoy acostumbrado a leer este género y admito que me resulto algo complejo encontrarme con la prosa de Márquez, pero una vez logrado pude disfrutar a otro nivel esta historia.
Lo único negativo que le encuentro, es que es un poco mas largo de lo necesario, siento que algunos desarrollos de personajes estuvieron de más.
Se me hizo absurdamente largo, pero cuando lo terminé quería más.
Es una historia que sucede en un contexto puntual, muy distinto al actual, y que está dibujado de tal manera que te hace viajar y adentrarte en lo más profundo de su mundo.
No estoy acostumbrado a leer este género y admito que me resulto algo complejo encontrarme con la prosa de Márquez, pero una vez logrado pude disfrutar a otro nivel esta historia.
Lo único negativo que le encuentro, es que es un poco mas largo de lo necesario, siento que algunos desarrollos de personajes estuvieron de más.
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Heart-wrenching, epic in scale, breathlessly written, and incredible, yet immensely flawed characters. Some incredibly challenging aspects of characters, especially Florentino's many extremely flawed relationships, but it is undeniably sweet, no other book I have ever read has made me feel so attached to its central romance. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing style is so effortless to read, his words flow beautifully through the page, and you find yourself blowing through chapters easily. I can understand the character flaws being too much for many readers, occasionally they were too much for me to look past, but understanding the book as an exaggerated depiction of normal flaws, ones that strengthen relationships, can open you up to enjoying one of the most beautiful depictions of love ever put to the page.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Adult/minor relationship, Alcoholism, Emotional abuse, Infidelity, Misogyny, Pedophilia, Racial slurs, Racism, Toxic relationship, Colonisation, Classism