After reading The Painted Veil by Maugham, in which cholera is prominently featured, I thought it was an ideal time to brave reading Love in the Time of Cholera, thinking it might be a nice segue even though I absolutely hated Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Cholera has very little to do with Love in the Time of Cholera (henceforward referred to as LITC) other than vaguely existing in the background, so it wasn’t quite the segue I was thinking it might be, but it was a much better experience than reading One Hundred Years of Slog.
Or at least the first 3/4ths is much more enjoyable. It has a lot less magical realism, which I can never fully understand. And it didn’t stray into pedophilia until that three-quarter point, so we had a lot more sans-pedophilic content compared to Marquez’s magnum opus. And no incest. So of course it’s better, but the bar was low. There were some odd kinks in this one, but only one horrific instance of grooming and statutory rape. And at least one separate instance of horrific romanticization of rape. The rest of it is half obsession and squalor and half maturity and nuance.
LITC is written in past-tense and has very little dialogue. So it’s a very passive narrative, which I don’t mind at all. But it’s composed of absurdly long chapters that can feel cumbersome when you aren’t totally invested in the book, as I wasn’t.
The first plot point about Dr. Urbino’s chess friend’s suicide had no relevance to the rest of the book. I think it might have been mentioned in passing once, but that was about it. So that’s a confusing setup (something about setting up the theme that love makes you want to die), but the remainder of the book follows Florentino and Fermina who exchange love letters when they’re young and engage themselves to each other. But when Fermina wakes up and realizes that she doesn’t love Florentino at all, she breaks off the engagement and later marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Florentino spends the rest of his life having sex with over 622 women (including at least one underage girl) and following Fermina’s life obsessively.
If the book was just about Fermina and Dr. Urbino, excluding Florentino entirely or including him as only a passing fad in Fermina’s life, the book would have been so much better. I did enjoy their relationship. It was a very mature and human exploration of marriage. They learned to love each other, enjoyed stability amidst their ups and downs, and ended up indispensable to each other. Their relationship was actually realistically sweet even though it had a questionable beginning, definitely wasn’t perfect, and survived through infidelity and separation.
But Florentino was pitiful from his very first chapter. He’s a stalker that was lucky enough to get close to his object of obsession, who he still could only really “love” from a distance for the majority of the book, never really getting to know her. I’m getting into spoilers now, but after Dr. Urbino dies, Florentino tries to continue courting Fermina, and she unfortunately eventually succumbs because she wants companionship. I really really hated her succumbing to the pathetic, pedophilic, obsessive creep and groomer. It was such a gross ending.
I’m going to give up trying to understand the hype around Marquez. He’s a decent writer, but he treats questionable behavior and worse-than-questionable behavior as normal, and perhaps he was just recording his surroundings in a society that normalized it on a larger scale, but it’s simply not enjoyable for me to read about so there’s no sense in subjecting myself to it.
