Book Review: Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez


I am almost ashamed to admit that it's taken me this long to read Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. I'm really not sure why, either, since Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is one of my favorite books. Part of it might have been the dreaded "literary intimidation" of steering clear of a book with a haughty title or a great reputation because you fear some grad school type slog which, in the end, will only leave you feeling like a lunkheaded ingrate three months later when you finally finish the book and have no idea what you read or why it's so well-respected.

Nothing could be further from the case with Love in the Time of Cholera. Turns out it's a highly accessible, funny, romantic and yet oddly realistic story about a love affair that spans more than half a century. It is not one of those well-written books in which nothing happens, nor is it some kind of high-minded, intellectual novel written to prove some kind of political or philosophical point when the author should have just written an essay. Instead, it's just a story, a good story, in which Marquez paints for a us a rich, ornate world and puts inside it odd, quirk-ridden and yet human, relatable characters. 

Set in coastal Columbia at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, the books tells the story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, two teenagers who fall in love -- at the distance demanded by the social conventions of the day, i.e. far --  but, because of one thing or another, their lives end up taking different turns. As far as the plot, that's all you really need to know. What do you need to know? Read on...

Cholera: First off, the book actually has very little to do with cholera, a now mostly eliminated water-born bacterial disease. You get cholera from drinking contaminated water (which it seems like there was a lot of back in 19th century Columbia), and it's not spread from person-to-person contact. So there are few -- if any -- parallels between the cholera epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. I supposed part of me went into reading this book looking for some kind of insight into what we're going through today with the pandemic, but I eventually realized there would not be any. 

Cholera exists in the book only as a kind of backdrop, a hall-mark of the times, something that looms out there on the horizon but it actually doesn't have much of an impact on the story.  In fact, COVID is much more an immediate part of our lives today than cholera seems to have been to these characters. In fact, if it weren't in the title of the book, it would merely be another part of the setting, just like the relentless heat or the ships pulling into and out of the harbor. Before I read this book I thought it was going to be some kind of tragic love story that takes place in the sick ward of a hospital and that the lovers get cholera and die in each others arms or something like that. Not the case. Not at all. 

Setting: One of the most fascinating parts about this book is the setting. The coastal Columbian port city in which Marquez sets this book -- which he does not actually name -- is a sweltering, un-electrified, un-airconditioned world caught between the conventions of far-off Europe and the local culture of Latin America and the Caribbean. It is a world of open-air markets, horse-drawn carriages, siestas, decaying aristocratic mansions (and decaying aristocratic families), superstitions, disease, and shockingly bad sanitation. Marquez spares no detail, either, in bringing this world to live, describing the the smells in such vivid detail that you will probably be cured of any desire to go back to coastal, turn of the 20th century Columbia, even if such a thing were possible. 

Probably the most salient thing about this world is the social values people must operate within, making love and romance a very serious thing and -- except in the most societally acceptable of cases -- forcing sex and affairs "underground" so to speak. Men are not permitted to be seen entering the homes of unmarried women, or married ones for that matter. For an unmarried man and an unmarried woman to be seen on the street walking together would amount to a scandal. The only women who seem to have any amount of sexual or personal freedom are widows, and even they must conduct their romantic and sexual affairs with the utmost secrecy. 

Thus, love in the time of cholera means, yes, love during the time when cholera was rampant throughout the land, but it also means love in the era -- the now-antique period of civilization -- in which things like cholera and open-air sewers and horse-drawn wagons were a thing. It's a subtle distinction, but it exists. If you can believe it there are eve more interpretations of the meaning of the title but I'm not going to get into them here.

Writing Style & Characters: A true Latin America writer in the greatest sense of that tradition, Marquez writes with that mystical, "looking back through the mists of time" kind of perspective, in which everything is sort of happening at once. He describes something a character does as a teenager, while in the same sentence relating it to something the character will do when he's 70 years old. He goes back and forth so much in time and in people's lives, that it gives you this oddly comforting sense of perspective. Although the plot is linear, in a sense, it is also somewhat circular, revolving around and around until you realize there is no destination, in fact you've been at the destination the entire time. This effect can truly be seen in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, which is an awesome book and you should read it.

Furthermore, his characters all have real, human foibles and quirks, making them three dimensional. A lot of times authors develop characters through their dialogue. This works, but it's a different kind of writing. No conversation in this book lasts more than a few lines. Marquez's character development is more about what his characters do in private, their personal habits, the things that annoy them, how they make love, etc. Once you know a character's weak spots, their story, what they do when no one's watching, it's hard not to like them. In this way Gabriel Garcia Marquez develops -- if not "realistic" per se (after all what does realistic mean in fiction) -- then at the least they are three dimensional and give you something to connect to at a personal level. 

Because he writes with this grandfatherly, philosophical, and yet humorous remove, Marquez is able to make some very trenchant observations about life in the pages of this book. Unfortunately, I borrowed the book from a friend and had to give it back, so I don't have any on hand. But I fully plan to read this book again within the next couple months, so perhaps I will do another entry on it.

Some of you out there will not like this book, surely. In fact, most people I talk to about it say "I started it but just couldn't get into it." A surprisingly frequent response, actually. I guess I can kind of see why. The book opens on a somber note, with a suicide, and the story seems like it is going to be a lot "darker" than it actually ends up being. Also, although half the characters in this book are women and the women characters are just as well-depicted as the men, this is a book written by a man and with a fairly "male" angle on things. It's also a setting, a time and place, in which women have few rights and are kept cooped up in corsets and in mansions, while the men are basically free to run around having sex with as many women as they can without getting caught. Granted, there are many times when women are sexually assertive and in this book women are not always portrayed as victims. But if you're easily offended by promiscuity and often inappropriate sexual behavior -- mostly perpetrated by men -- or just don't want to read a book that takes place in that type of environment, then you might take a pass on Love in the Time of Cholera

Comments

Popular Posts