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: 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!
Book Review: Why read another love story? - Because this is Marquez
Summary: 5 Stars
This story opens in the aftermath of the death of
Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. His friends gather and discuss
Jeremiah's movements which led to his suicide, by
gold cyanide poisoning. The dead man's friend, Dr Juvenal
Urbino, decides that there is no need for an autopsy, and
points out to the disappointed medical intern,
deprived of this opportunity to learn "There is bound
to be someone driven mad by love who will give you the
the chance one of these days"....."And when you do find one,
observe with care. They almost always have crystals in their heart."
Jeremiah's secret love of many years, a mulatta of
powerful presence, had played chess with the old man
on his last night, and knew that he wished for death.
She had beaten him in the game, and "She insisted
that she deserved no praise, but rather that Jeremiah
de Saint-Amour, already lost in the mists of death,
had moved his pieces without love."
The scene thus set, the real story begins. The
Mulatta's complicity in Jeremiah's last actions
underscores the most powerful theme of this book:
the power of love. Briefly, this is the story of a man
who lives for the love of a woman. They meet as
teenagers, and are separated by her disapproving father.
But the young man, Florentino Ariza, pursues his
hopeless love, the beautiful but haughty Fermina Daza,
for fifty years. She becomes the reson for his life,
consumes his every thought, and eventually becomes
his after the death of her beloved husband, the same
Dr Juvenal Urbino of the opening scene. A common plot
indeed, and one which lends itself to melodrama -
but not in the hands of Marquez. This story is told
with the mastery and magic of all of Marquez's
books, and we believe in the characters, and the plot,
because they are essentially true.
The beautiful language, so expressive of wonder
and sadness, and so full of aching truths that we can
all share, is what sets this book apart.
Marquez builds characters like no-one else can. They
follow nature rather than norm, they live
passionate and colourful lives, and when their
time comes, they die with dignity, and sometimes
panache, leaving this world before their presence
becomes dissonant, before the colours dry. Fate and
fatality are accepted in this world which sets
traditional knowledge and instinct above science,
commerce and law. And the result is a book which,
like all of Marquez, is a joy to read and re-read.
Anthony Nelson.