Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez (1985)
“A man waits fifty-one years, nine months, and four days for the woman he loves — and García Márquez makes you believe every second of it.”
At a Glance
Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza as a teenager in a Caribbean Colombian city in the late 1800s. Her father forbids the match and sends her away. Fermina marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a distinguished physician, and lives a respectable upper-class life for over fifty years. Florentino waits — filling the decades with 622 affairs while never abandoning his devotion. When Dr. Urbino dies falling from a ladder while chasing a parrot, Florentino appears at the funeral and declares his love again. Fermina is outraged, then slowly relents. The two elderly lovers board a riverboat and sail under a cholera flag so no one will disturb them, choosing love over the world's approval at last.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published in 1985, three years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize, the novel was immediately recognized as a masterwork — and as a deliberate departure from the mythic scale of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Where that novel covered seven generations, Love in the Time of Cholera covers one love story across one lifetime. It proved that García Márquez's genius was not limited to epic magic realism but could operate at intimate, human scale. It has sold over 50 million copies worldwide and is consistently ranked among the greatest novels of the 20th century.
Diction Profile
Elevated, ornate, with long subordinate clauses and cataloguing sentences — the maximalist tradition of Latin American prose
Very high but grounded in the physical