Love in the Time of Cholera

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.

In an unnamed Caribbean city modeled on Cartagena, Colombia, the novel opens with the death of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a chess-playing photographer who has committed suicide rather than grow old. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the city's most prominent physician, is called to certify the death. That same afte...