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hydrogynous 's review for:
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez
I don't know how else to describe how evocative this book is without saying how much it reeks. It smells like flowers, perfumed paper, asparagus piss, cotton dresses, anisette, almonds, sex, sweat, shit, and swamp. So much of the story is just the setting: the colonial city, bloated and decaying, the river where manatees swim with corpses, the sea with its false treasures. Beauty and ugliness, life and death sleep side by side here and García Márquez captures it in rich detail. The characters themselves are all fascinating and full of contradictions. Florentino Ariza is passion and sickness incarnate, so full of it that he could keel over and die at any moment, but he clings onto his youth the longest. Juvenal Urbino is a man of society, hellbent on eradicating cholera and cleansing the city, yet he too eventually succumbs to the fits and throes of passion, to the detriment of his wife. And Fermina Daza, trapped between these two extremes, never fully quite getting a foothold on her own happiness until she's almost ready to die. It's all sad as hell, especially when you think of the collateral damage left in the wake of this "love story." But García Márquez has a very tongue-in-cheek sense of humor that made me laugh even with so many terrible things going on, like he's jerking his thumb back at his own characters saying "Get a load of these motherfuckers." What an emotional and visual literary roller coaster.