Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, published in Spanish in 1985, is a sweeping romance set in an unnamed Caribbean port city resembling Cartagena, Colombia, that follows three lives across more than half a century. As a teenage telegraph clerk, Florentino Ariza falls passionately in love with Fermina Daza, the brilliant daughter of a self made mule trader, but Fermina ultimately rejects him and marries the patrician doctor Juvenal Urbino, who has built his reputation fighting the city's cholera epidemics. Florentino spends the next fifty one years, nine months, and four days running the riverboat company, conducting more than six hundred quiet love affairs, and waiting for a moment to renew his offer to Fermina. The novel's central insight is that romantic love is itself a kind of chronic illness, with symptoms indistinguishable from cholera. The book is considered one of the great late masterpieces of magical realism and one of Garcia Marquez's most patient meditations on aging.
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What you might want to know about Love in the Time of Cholera
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza as a teenager in a Caribbean port city. She marries a respectable doctor instead. Florentino spends fifty-one years, nine months, and four days waiting for her husband to die.
Garcia Marquez's prose is rich, with long sentences and a sweeping multi-decade timeline. The Edith Grossman translation is widely recommended for English readers. Most readers find it slower than One Hundred Years of Solitude but ultimately more accessible.
Yes. A 2007 film adaptation directed by Mike Newell and starring Javier Bardem was released. The film received mixed reviews and is widely considered to capture some elements of the novel while losing the language's rhythm.
Love in the Time of Cholera was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Love in the Time of Cholera is a standalone novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, not part of a series.
Love in the Time of Cholera is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.