Books

Love in the Time of Cholera
By Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Edith Grossman (variety of editions)

With a recently released movie and attention from Oprah Winfrey, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera has enjoyed some time in the sun these last 12 months.

Written six years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature, it stands as proof that the ultimate award did not hamper García Márquez's talent. The 20-year-old classic is also a good representation of García Márquez's larger body of fiction.

García Márquez's fully embroidered tale of adolescent love reined in by parental and societal demands provides illustration of love as infatuation, love in a stable marriage, love in its tawdrier forms, love as an ageless human condition, and above all, love surviving in the chaos of human affairs.

Idealistic romantic love and temporary sexual liaisons exist side by side without, strangely, seeming to interfere with one another.

This tragi-comedy of human existence is set in a 60-year period overlapping the turn of the 20th century in Colombia.

The main character, Florentino Ariza, suffers disappointment in his first love when Fermina Daza's father engineers her marriage to the successful and high born Dr. Juvenal Urbino. The book focuses on the 50 years Florentino waits for Urbino's death to resume his courtship of Fermina.

Florentino, unlike Fermina, does not settle for the security of a safe marriage, but plots his life to be deserving of Fermina's love.

He settles, during the decades that he waits, for numerous affairs to which he devotes only a part of himself. And he sets himself to rising from poverty to prominence solely to be ready for the time when Fermina is a free woman again.

But the story is also Fermina's. It follows her from her youthful epiphany that she prefers the security and status of marriage to the prominent physician over a liaison with the struggling Florentino to her finding love with Dr. Urbino and loving, as well, the life that marriage provides.

With echoes of Faulknerian influences, the language of the novel is sweepingly beautiful; the society is horrifyingly complex; and the scenery ranges from heartbreakingly gorgeous to nauseatingly sordid.

The title is, in fact, a bit of a synopsis: that human love exists in many forms, and it is something of a miracle that it exists in the ruins of a cruel, unjust and plague-ridden society. It is a book that should not be missed.

Judith H. McKibbin is a retired instructor of English at Jacksonville State University.