Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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 over a fifty-year period and contains an injection of tragedy, pathos, darkness and high emotion, yet is run through with an empathy and quiet humour that is characteristic of much of Garcia Marquez's writing. Thematically it is very different from the writer's earlier work and is comparable only in the way in which the reader is emotionally engaged by the narrative.

Garcia Marquez gains an emotional hold in the first two pages of his narrative as he drags his reader into a scene of death, confusion and charged emotion. Indeed, the first two lines of the novel set the tone of the story: "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love". Here, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, "distinguished war veteran, photographer of children", has chosen suicide over the indignities of old age: his death reveals his 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 love...

The reader is now plunged into another time period, more than fifty years before, as the courtship between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza is re-enacted: a courtship of secretly exchanged letters and glances and burning obsession. However, on meeting her lover again - after a period of separation precipitated by her father's discovery of the romance - Fermina considers their earlier emotions mere adolescent obsession and consequently rejects him. She then goes on to marry the wealthy and eminent Dr. Juvenal Urbino - to the acute despair of Florentino Ariza. Throughout the book extremely subtle, but fascinating, parallels are drawn between the chaos wrought by the disease of cholera on the nation and the chaos wrought by the 'disease' of love on individuals.

The writer carefully interweaves the events and emotions of Fermina and Florentino's subsequent lives. Florentino Ariza is a character who is pathetic, grotesque, yet also somewhat compelling and endearing. After his rejection he tries to fill in the void of his unrequited passion by engaging in numerous affairs and, "Fifty years later, when Fermina Daza was freed from her sacramental sentence, he had some twenty-five notebooks, with six hundred and twenty-two entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the countless fleeting adventures that did not even deserve a charitable mention." Yet, in his own way he remains faithful to Fermina Daza. Everything in his life that he does is for her, whether it is becoming president of the shipping company where he works, buying and renovating the house where he and his mother live, or even becoming a better lover by endless 'practice'.

Fermina meanwhile is in an initially loveless but later loving and mutually-reliant marriage, which endures its problems but emerges strong and intact until the time of her husband's death. In the relation of this marriage, Garcia Marquez explores a different kind of love: a love that begins with little passion but steadily grows into something remarkable in its strength.

After the demise of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, life offers Fermina and Florentino - at an age considered by many as being only significant as a prelude to death - a chance to discover new love and new happiness. From the drawing room of Fermina Daza's house to a river boat sailing through the jungle along the Rio Magdalena, a love develops that will not burn itself out, like the raging fire of youthful passion, but will only be extinguished with the end of life itself.

Love in the Time of Cholera is a book remarkable for it's portrayal of love in all it's different forms and its insistence on the multi-faceted nature of love: love can be born, it can be killed, oppressed, built, destroyed, created and recreated. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a word-smith with the seemingly endless ability to transport his reader to another time and place. His narrative is entrancing in the way that it so convincingly evokes both emotion and location: as the reader is caught up in the emotions of the story's romances when Marquez dissects the thoughts of his characters, so he is transported to that town on the Caribbean coast with its energy-sapping heat, dirt, poverty and the remnants of old wealth.