Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Advantages: A captivating book from an extraordinarily skilled author
Disadvantages: You won't want the story to end!

Love in the Time of Cholera is one of the best known novels by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I picked up this book after reading, and immensely enjoying, his earlier novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Love in the Time of Cholera is set in Colombia during the chaotic aftermath of liberation from Spanish dominion, when the country was racked by political dispute and civil war. The tale is one of unrequited love ...
...hidden life - a clandestine love affair. At the time of Saint-Amour's death, Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his proud stately wife, Fermina Daza, are in the fiftieth year of their marriage. Dr. Urbino's death occurs soon afterwards as he falls off a ladder, trying to catch his wayward parrot, which is sitting in a mango tree. At Urbino's funeral we are introduced to Florentino Ariza who comes to repeat to Fermina Daza his vow of fidelity and everlasting ... Read review

Advantages: Sweet, tender, well-written, gorgeous prose
Disadvantages: Not enough time to read it!

...Cholera" is an achingly beautiful love story set in Panama in the late 1800s through the beginnings of the 20th century by Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Translated from the original Spanish, it is the tale of Florentino Ariza and his love, some might say obsession, for the beautiful yet seemingly unattainable Fermina Daza. The novel traces Florentino Ariza's love for Fermina Daza over the better part of six decades, and when her husband, ...
...fell for Fermina Daza, of love letters and conspiratorial exchanges. Florentino is consumed by his love for Fermina Daza, and is devastated when he learns she is marrying one of the most prominent members in society. He vows to save himself for the day he will eventually have her, but after an incident on a boat, commits hundreds (can’t recall the exact figure) of infidelities while waiting for his lady love. Their lives diverge, and we hear ... Read review

Advantages: great novel, great writer
Disadvantages: none

...the story of an unrequited love dating back over half a century. It begins with the death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino a well-respected physician. His widow Fermina Diaz is distraught, but the tranquillity of her mourning is disturbed by the appearance of Florentino Ariza her first suitor. The book then plunges into flashback mode and we encounter the two main characters as young people. We see the lengths that Florentino Ariza goes to try and win the ...
...extent that he can never love anybody else and he holds on to the faint and often desperate hope that he can eventually win the heart of Fermina Diaz. With the death of the Doctor Florentino Ariza sees his chance and seizes it ultimately finding the love that he has waited his entire life for. This novel is brilliantly written. The plot sounds unexciting but the prose is delightful. You will experience the full gamut of emotions of emotions. Some ... Read review

Advantages: Abosrbing reading anywhere
Disadvantages: Too much time spent reading it!

...fit this bill well. Love in the Time of Cholera (LITOC) is a tremendous love story that spans many decades, starting with young obsessive love and an affair by letters to a new found youth in the later years. The tale in between involves love, marriage, families, affairs, denial.....all brought together in a book which I couldn't stop reading. The setting is so magically described that reading the book was more like watching a film on the pages ...
...could read it no longer! Love in the Time of Cholera has been sitting on my bookshelf for a few months now and will most certainly be brought out for a second reading soon! I am certainly no literary critic and don't read books for hidden meanings but enjoy something more than a bonkbuster and know a talented writer when I read a book by one. ... Read review