Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez called Love in the Time of Cholera his greatest book. Many of his readers agree, and the reason is simple: while One Hundred Years of Solitude is a novel about everything, Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel about one thing — love in all its absurd, obsessive, devastating, and ultimately redemptive forms.

Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza when they are teenagers in a Caribbean port city at the turn of the twentieth century. Their courtship is conducted through feverish letters and stolen glances. When Fermina's father sends her away, and she returns to reject Florentino — suddenly seeing him as "nothing more than a shadow" — he makes a decision that will define his entire existence: he will wait for her. For over fifty years.

In the meantime, Fermina marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a distinguished physician, and builds a life of respectability and quiet compromise. Florentino, meanwhile, conducts 622 love affairs while never relinquishing his devotion to Fermina. The number is not metaphorical — he keeps a ledger.

When Dr. Urbino dies (in a scene involving a parrot that is both comic and heartbreaking), Florentino reappears at the funeral and declares his love. He is seventy-six years old. Fermina is seventy-two. What follows is one of the most beautiful and unexpected love stories ever written — proof that García Márquez understood something about the human heart that most novelists never approach.

Love in the Time of Cholera earns its place because it does what almost no other novel has managed: it takes love seriously as a subject for adult fiction without descending into sentimentality or cynicism. García Márquez writes about love the way a naturalist writes about weather — as a force that operates according to its own laws, indifferent to human dignity, capable of inspiring both the sublime and the ridiculous.

Florentino Ariza is not a romantic hero in any conventional sense. He is obsessive, self-deluding, and morally compromised. His 622 affairs include at least one that is deeply troubling by any standard. Yet García Márquez never reduces him to a cautionary tale. Instead, he presents Florentino's lifelong devotion as simultaneously pathological and magnificent — because that is what love actually is, if we are honest about it.

The novel also earns its place through sheer beauty of prose. Even in translation, García Márquez's sentences have a music and a fullness that few writers in any language can match. Every page contains at least one line that makes you stop, reread, and breathe. This is a novel that proves literature can do things that no other art form can.

Published in 1985, Love in the Time of Cholera was written three years after García Márquez received the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was an immediate international bestseller, translated into dozens of languages and selling millions of copies worldwide. The novel was adapted into a 2007 film starring Javier Bardem. García Márquez based elements of the story on his own parents' courtship, which lends the narrative an autobiographical tenderness. The novel is widely considered the greatest love story of the twentieth century and is frequently cited by other writers — including Junot Díaz and Jeffrey Eugenides — as a defining influence.