34. Love in the Time of Cholera

34. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (10/21/2011 - 11/1/2011; 12/24/2011 - 1/14/2011)

I ran into a problem with this book: it's interesting, but it's not super engrossing at the beginning; thus, I put it down around November 1st and didn't pick it up until the end of December.

Gabriel García Márquez is an amazing author -- I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude, which is one of the best books I've ever read, so I was excited to pick up Love in the Time of Cholera.

This was an unusual book.  The beginning takes a really long time to get going; there's a lot of background information that Márquez uses to get to the actual story, and it turns out that most of that background information really isn't that important to the plot.  From there, the story is told largely through flashback -- most of the 300 pages of the book is a really long flashback -- but it eventually makes a full circle back to the end of the first chapter of the novel.

The love story is that of Fermina Daza and Florentina Ariza, two individuals who fall in love while they are teenagers.  Their love is interrupted by Fermina's realization that it was all an illusion, and she instead marries a rich and successful doctor.  They live out about 50 years of marriage in relative happiness, and she doesn't give Florentino much of a second thought.  But Florentino never forgets his love for Fermina; he ends up having over 600 affairs to pass the time between Fermina's rejection of him and the death of her husband more than 50 years later.

It's a very confusing thing, this book.  My empathy went back and forth for Florentino; sometimes I was on his side, but sometimes I decided he was probably the creepiest character I could think of.  And Fermina seemed very stuck up at times, so I wasn't really on her side either.  But the end of the book is quite spectacular.  After Fermina's husband dies, Florentino seeks her out to profess his love to her again.  And, surprisingly enough, there is a happy ending for the two of them, despite pretty much all the odds in the book, including Fermina's own professed hatred for Florentino.

So I liked this book, but ultimately, I think One Hundred Years of Solitude is a better example of Gabriel García Márquez's work.