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A review by ejrathke
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
5.0
A tremendous novel, though not as good as One Hundred Years of Solitude [though, really, what is?].
A novel about love in its many forms, from transient to incidental to learnt to physical to metaphysical to everlasting to invented. And I think that last one, which I borrow from the novel, is part of the key: the invention of love. Each character, in his and her own way, invents love in a very real way.
But it's more than a simple love story. All the history of South America swirls around the events as endless war and revolution sweeps past the lovers, seemingly only touching the periphery of their lives, though curfews are imposed, rulers come and go, politics wave and flicker from left to right. The countryside is ravaged unknowingly, far away, but right at hand, if only the characters looked the other way, from love to death.
And it's circular, too, how the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end, in very real ways, in ways quite different from the way Finnegans Wake is meant to be a closed circuit. This book is very much alive and ever expanding, concentrically.
It's about seduction in its many forms as well and Garcia Marquez pulls us in, almost reluctantly, almost without us knowing, until we're so caught, so wholly in love with the book, as in love, maybe, as the characters are with one another, that even the thought of closing, of reaching the end, becomes unbearable.
To call it simply a love story is to do it a great injustice, but it is certainly a great love story. Not only in the obvious ways, in the way love literally drips off of every page, but also in the subtle ways that we may not even realise until we're one hundred pages deeper. For, in some ways, it's about the dangers and evils of love. About how love destroys, even as it brings us back to life. How the greatest lies and greatest debasements are often done in love's name.
Beautiful, humorous, and powerful. The kind of book that reaffirms life, in all its complexity, even at life's end.
A novel about love in its many forms, from transient to incidental to learnt to physical to metaphysical to everlasting to invented. And I think that last one, which I borrow from the novel, is part of the key: the invention of love. Each character, in his and her own way, invents love in a very real way.
But it's more than a simple love story. All the history of South America swirls around the events as endless war and revolution sweeps past the lovers, seemingly only touching the periphery of their lives, though curfews are imposed, rulers come and go, politics wave and flicker from left to right. The countryside is ravaged unknowingly, far away, but right at hand, if only the characters looked the other way, from love to death.
And it's circular, too, how the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end, in very real ways, in ways quite different from the way Finnegans Wake is meant to be a closed circuit. This book is very much alive and ever expanding, concentrically.
It's about seduction in its many forms as well and Garcia Marquez pulls us in, almost reluctantly, almost without us knowing, until we're so caught, so wholly in love with the book, as in love, maybe, as the characters are with one another, that even the thought of closing, of reaching the end, becomes unbearable.
To call it simply a love story is to do it a great injustice, but it is certainly a great love story. Not only in the obvious ways, in the way love literally drips off of every page, but also in the subtle ways that we may not even realise until we're one hundred pages deeper. For, in some ways, it's about the dangers and evils of love. About how love destroys, even as it brings us back to life. How the greatest lies and greatest debasements are often done in love's name.
Beautiful, humorous, and powerful. The kind of book that reaffirms life, in all its complexity, even at life's end.