Reviews for Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Summary and Reviews

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Book Reviews of Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

Book Review: His second best book
Summary: 5 Stars

After 100 years of solitude, this is Garcia's best book. Again this great story teller gives us a love story in his poetic style of writing with both having a funny and sad themes in it. I hope a director like B. Bertolucii makes a film out of this great story.

Book Review: A splendid black comedy of love. Lush and lively.
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a book written in rich and beautiful prose. Even in an English translation, the language is musical, picturesque and poetic. The book pretends to focus on an enduring frustrated love; a rejected suitor, who continues to love one woman although she has married another. Instead, for me, the focus of the book is truly on the other love story within it; on the amazingly rich, complex, and true picture of the love, understanding, and pettiness of a long-standing marital love. For anyone who has experienced a "good" marriage, this insightful, poetic, comical book is a delight.

Book Review: Toothpast or Great Literature
Summary: 5 Stars

In a world of shallow choices (which of the 37 varieties of toothpaste will you buy next time?) this book lets the reader escape to a place where one man commits to one woman. Forever.

Love in the Time of Cholera is set in the Carribean during the last century. Beautifully written and masterfully plotted it explores the problem of marriage, the problem of love, the problem of life. With more insights than solutions Garcia Marquez details the qualites that add up to commitment, the disappointing ordinariness of ordinary commitments, and the extraordianry price paid by the purist.

At a time when guys with "commitment problems" impossibly outnumber "women who know what they want" by about a zillion to one, this is one wonderful novel.


Book Review: A review of "Love in the Time of Cholera" by Marquez
Summary: 5 Stars

Power, passion, lust and waiting are all aspects of this acclaimed and magnificent novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The story is at once both intriguing and heart-shattering, the characters are realistic. This is the story of an ill-fated love between two members of a small town in South America, and the story of their courting, a courting that lasts for over half a century.

Garcia is a master of magical realty, and this novel is proof of that. His use description and humor, combined with the elegant hand with which his prose is written, makes for a simply spectacular work of literature.


Book Review: Marquez is the Muse of Love
Summary: 5 Stars

Where "100 Years of Solitude" is the greatest testament to family ever written, "Love in the Time of Cholera" is the greatest testament to love.

I was lucky to have already experienced love before reading this book, because I don't know if I would have been able to comprehend this book without such an advantage.

Read this book and you will forever be haunted by the smell of almonds. You will never forget the image of Fermina and Juvenal travelling in a hot air balloon as dead cows and human beings decorate the rivers below, their remains being eaten by vultures--Marquez' bird of choice.

There are also two memorable scenes in this book for how painfully real they are. One, Marquez' description of Urbino's fall from a ladder, which leads to his death, is expertly detailed. Death is never a simple occurence in the world of Marquez', and Urbino's last breaths are decorated with thoughts of Fermina and the relief in having experienced love. Two: Fermina realizing, "moments" after her husband's death, that all her life, she has given her love to the wrong man.

Never melodramatic because Marquez creates characters whose passions are all too human. There is such a thing as love in Marquez' world and nothing proves this more than Florentino Ariza writing his love for Fermina on rose petals.

I hope that I will always have a love in my life as intense as the love Florentino has for Fermina, and if I ever have to wait as long as he did, I hope that my journey is as rewarding.

Marquez teaches us that love comes in many forms and although we may expereince it differently, without it, we are incomplete. Ultimately, of course, his message is that with love we can easily conquer or "rise above" the most unbearable of human sorrows.

Muchas gracias Senor Marquez! Eres un buen instructor!

More Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club) reviews:
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