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.”
Character Analysis
A man who organizes his entire existence around a single feeling. Florentino waits fifty-one years for Fermina, conducting 622 affairs as substitutes, rising through a river company, and never once questioning whether his devotion is sane. He is simultaneously the most romantic and the most predatory character in the novel — capable of genuine tenderness and genuine exploitation. García Márquez refuses to resolve this contradiction. Florentino is the novel's argument that love, in its purest form, is not moral.
Poetic, overwrought in youth, meditative in age. His language is always excessive — too many words, too much feeling. He writes in the register of nineteenth-century romantic poetry.