About this title: A novel about love, time, and an unusual triangular love affair. For 53 years, Florentino Ariza waits patiently for Fermina Daza, the woman who once loved him. While he waits, he becomes astonishingly successful with other women (he has 622 liaisons). She marries another man and lives a life of intense respectability. Finally, she is widowed, and their lives begin again. This is the original Spanish-language version of the text.
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Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Penguin, NY
Date Published: 1996
ISBN-13:9780140255782ISBN:0140255788
Description: Very Good. 0140255788. A clean, crisp copy. Edges of covers are lightly rubbed. Text is in Spanish.; 0.84 x 7.86 x 5 Inches; 464 pages. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: EDITORIAL OVEJA NEGRA
Date Published: 1985
ISBN-13:9789580600008ISBN:9580600007
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Book is clean & tight except there is writing on the front end papers. Jacket shows wear around the edges. Stated: 1a edicion diciembre 1985.; 473 Pages read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Vintage Books
Date Published: 2007-10-09
ISBN-13:9780307387264ISBN:0307387267
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780307387264. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Date Published: 2007
ISBN-13:9780307387264ISBN:0307387267
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Mass-market paperback
Publisher: Bruguera, Barcelona, España
Date Published: 1985
ISBN-13:9780840210630ISBN:0840210639
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Text in Spanish. 502 p.; 19 cm. Narradores de hoy (Bruguera (Firm)); 100. Narradores de hoy; 100.. read more
Description: Hardcover, large octavo. First Columbian edition. This is the 'lujo' issue, in white boards with predominately light blue dust wrapper. A near fine copy in a very good dust wrapper. The bottom 3 cm of the spine of the wrapper and 2 cm adjacent on front panel were rumpled; although now smoothed out under a mylar protector, it is still evident. No tears or loss to dust wrapper. No previous owner's markings to book. read more
Description: ILLUSTRATOR: None PUBLISHER: Mexico: Editorial Diana, (1989) 2nd printing DESCRIPTION: book is an 8 1/4" x 5 1/4" soft cover with off white wraps, 378 pages CONDITION: Book is good, tips curned, slightly soiled foxing at the page tops Owner embossment on the front end page DUST JACKET: There is no dust jacket ABOUT THIS BOOK: The text of this book is in Spanish. read more
"GGM is an amazing writer, his prose is fluid and draws you in. I wish my Spanish was still good enough to read this in the original, rather than the translation.
Unlike many of the people that disliked the book, I had no problems with Florentino sleeping around. His promiscuity was no issue for me, I mean, people do this all the time. I struck me as an honest dipction of how some people live. And I even get that he could never really kill his love for Fermina. My personal opinion is that everyone you love you love with a different part of your heart and love in a different way. What I couldn't like was his inability to incorperate his past into his present, to live in the present, to embrace life and enjoy those who cared about him. (Yes, I get that this was intentional.) I felt bad for him, but in the same way I feel bad for addicts...they live in a hell of their own actions. Which, when you think about it, is the case for much of humanity.
I never really got the sense of love from either Florentino or Fermina. I got obsession pure and simple. I do remember being head over heels for someone when I was a teenager and I get that obsessive is the best way to characterize those feelings. But to classify it as love, and a love that is worth dwelling on for 50 years, I never got that in all of the beautiful writing in the book. I felt like I could identify much more with the kind of comfortable, familiar love that is clearly expressed between Fermina and Juvenal. The two "loves" are very different, and the problem is that the marriage and their relationship is so much better illuminated than whatever existed between Fermina and Florentino. Admittedly, the relationship between Florentino and Fermina became much more understandable and relatable when they reconnected during their twilight years.
The only time that I really disliked Florentino's character was in the incident with America. I can overlook the pedophilia, but I can't overlook that he took advantage of someone he was supposed to care about. I can't overlook his abuse of power and I can't overlook his lack of empathy for her. What really "got my goat" was his total lack of remorse when his own horrible actions caused her death.
All in all, I thought this was a beautifully written book with a horribly boring plot. Its worth reading just for the prose, but if I were going to recommend a GGM book it wouldn't be this one, it would be 100 Years of Solitude."
"This book contains the most single lines in one work that I wish to lift from their pages and paste around my house so that I may bask in their glory on a daily basis.
Reading other reviews of this text always puzzles me. No, I don't need everyone to love what I love to the extent that I love it, but it just seems that those who detest it have really suffered a failure at literacy. With the risk of further offense, I will state that I believe the culprit is that cute little "Oprah's Book Club." This is not a work on which you stick a celebrity (if that's what she is) seal of approval and then throw in a gym bag or beach bag and sneak some pages in here and there because some famous lady told you that you should. It's serious literature.
And yet hilarious. Marquez shines as a comic genius of irony (the significance of cholera to this book is, itself, genius storytelling) and critical examiner of human relationships. An exploration on love-- love in all forms-- is conducted as thoroughly as if it were a science project. Perhaps this is where Marquez loses the aforementioned displeased readers, who wish to bottle love in a neat definition or notion that closely reflects the love they are experiencing in their own lives. The world is much broader than our silly little individual plights, my friends, and the experience of love changes if you are to ask an old woman, young man, or adolescent girl to define it. Marquez captures each of their stories, and more, and never asks that his reader compare these to their own experience of love, he simply describes them and includes them in Love's definition.
I find the courtship between Fermina and Florentino dazzling and spot-on. Yes, it is obsessive and incredibly fickle, but that is MY experience of adolescent love! I find new love between octogenarians inspiring and heartwarming, because after an entire lifetime, what two other individuals better know themselves and, thus, are able to give themselves entirely to each other? I also wasn't offended (as many are) by Florentino's relationship with the under-age America. Again, Marquez is being exploratory, and he gives no love or relationship safe haven from his literary microscope. He doesn't purport to create "perfect" and "ideal" characters, and how many of us can truly say we "like" our own mates ALL of the time anyway? This isn't "The Notebook," and some of the depicted relationships might come across as unsavory and vile to some of our self-righteous American eyes, but isn't such narrow-mindedness a bad mate for *real* literature anyway?
"Love in the Time of Cholera" is fine literature. Superbly written, beautiful and rich, I see this as nothing short of a masterpiece."
"Love in the Time of Cholera is not a simple love story. To read it as such would be a disservice to the book's exploration of love as an infinitely complex emotion; as an emotion that can both contradict and embrace itself within the same heartbeat. Without favoring any expression, Gabriel García Márquez speaks of long marriages, happy in their stability and co-dependency. He speaks of promiscuity, and how "one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them." The protagonist states,"My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse." pg. 270 Márquez speaks of passion. He speaks of comfort. He allows love to exist in all its forms and acknowledges that the existence of one form does not cheapen another.
The story is told with the breath of nostalgia; the characters old and young at once, their fates pre-determined. As with all of Márquez's writing, you float effortlessly through the lines and finish feeling as though you have just woke from napping pleasantly in the sun."
"In a word: disappointing. LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA is held up as a Classic Love Story for the Timeless Ages. I was prepared to be Swept Away By A Passionate Tale. Instead, I plodded through it - on the Metro, on the beach, on my lunch break, waiting for the moment when it would All Be Worth It. I am still waiting. Here are the difficulties:
1. The hero is a pedophile. Really. I can account for differences of culture and era, but I cannot get past the romantic hero being a sexual predator, whose selfishness and carelessness (in the worst sense of the word) result in the suicide of a young girl entrusted to his care.
Bet they didn't put that in the movie.
Add to that that he is the sort of guy that shows up on your doorstep the day of your husband's funeral and says, "Hey, baby, so I hear you're on the market again..."
My hero!
2. The beginning is written from the point of view of Dr. Urbino and details the story of one of his chess buddies. Both die within the opening chapters, and the point of view shifts completely. I felt mislead...and confused.
3. And, perhaps the most troubling, for a love story that spanned over 50 years, I did not see love. Youthful infatuation, yes, maybe a dangerous nostalgia but no emotion, except perhaps obsession, that would sustain a relationship for so many years. For all his purported love and pathetic poetry, Florentino wasn't faithful. And Fermina never seemed that into him - even from the beginning. One weak, the other cold: I find it hard to believe that if the two of them had defied society and married at a young age that they would have had a happy marriage, to say nothing of a happily ever after. Sometimes the cruelties of class work out for the best.
What makes this book maybe worth reading - maybe - is the beautiful sound and feel of Marquez's writing. That is pure poetry. Too bad it did not have a more worthy subject."
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