Love in the Time of Cholera follows Florentino Ariza's decades-long devotion to Fermina Daza, whom he loved as a young telegraph operator before she married the esteemed Dr. Juvenal Urbino instead. Over more than fifty years in an unnamed Caribbean port city, the novel alternates between Florentino's restless pursuit of countless lovers while he waits and the long, ordinary intimacy of the Urbinos' marriage. When Dr. Urbino's death finally frees Fermina, Florentino gets his chance to reclaim a love interrupted half a century before. Gabriel García Márquez treats aging, illness, and desire with the same lush, mythic realism he brought to his earlier work, turning a story of stubborn persistence into a meditation on love as a lifelong condition.
Books mentioned in Love in the Time of Cholera (5)
Penguin Island by Anatole France: “He was immersed in L'Ile des pingouins, the novel that everyone was reading in those days, and he answered without surfacing: "Oui."”
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque: “They saw All Quiet on the Western Front, a film based on a book that had been popular the year before and that Dr.”
Man, the Unknown by Alexis Carrel: “Urbino had two books by his hand: Man, the Unknown by Alexis Carrel and The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe; the pages of the second book were still uncut, and he asked Digna Pardo, the cook, to bring him the marble paper cutter he had left in the bedroom.”
The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe: “Urbino had two books by his hand: Man, the Unknown by Alexis Carrel and The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe; the pages of the second book were still uncut, and he asked Digna Pardo, the cook, to bring him the marble paper cutter he had left in the bedroom.”
Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana o Española by Sebastián de Covarrubias: “When he finished, he had some thousand letters in three volumes as complete as the Covarrubias Dictionary, but no printer in the city would take the risk of publishing them, and they ended up in an attic along with other papers from the past, for Tránsito Ariza flatly refused to dig o”
Books that mention Love in the Time of Cholera (2)
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose: “I remember how long it took me to get through the last hundred pages of Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera.”
The Disappearers by Marlon James: “Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, Toni Morrison's Beloved...”