[BOOK REVIEW] Love in the Time of Cholera

 Many spoilers ahead... read with caution!

Definitely not a romance. Yikes.

I listened to a podcast the other day that posited that in contemporary literary analysis, we are so hyper-focused on the character’s motivations and the author’s values that we miss the entire purpose of the story: the plot. The book was not written for the characters; the characters arose from the plot. I did not immediately understand this claim, but reading reviews for this book, it started to make more sense to me. If García Márquez said to himself, “I want to write a book about a man who's been in love with the same woman for fifty-one years, nine months, and four days,” then only one character could play that role: dramatic, poetic, tragic Florentino Ariza. Violent, obsessive, repulsive Florentino Ariza.

I say that my understanding of this concept came out of these reviews, because I’ve seen two primary categories of reviews for this book: the first, people who read this book as a beautiful romance of star-crossed lovers reuniting after decades, and the second, people who were utterly appalled that this book could ever be called a romance, with the disgusting, absolutely horrific hero that is Florentino Ariza, and as such, the book is a disgrace to books, and the work of García Márquez should be thrown out with all the other outdated trash. If the purpose of the book was to create a protagonist to admire and emulate, a protagonist we ladies could swoon over, then I’d be inclined towards the latter camp with a vengeance. And because I can’t really find anyone who interpreted this book the way I did, then that perspective is probably correct. But it’s just hard for me to read it that way. The book does not seem set up to give us a hero. Florentino Ariza is the Walter White of dramatic romance protagonists: a man whose slow descent into evil we watch with morbid horror, only to later wonder, was it really that slow of a descent? Or was he like that from the beginning?

This is the first real book review I’m writing, but I’m writing it because while reading, there were so many moments I had to pause and take notes, simply because of how brilliant García Márquez is at weaving in his themes and motifs. I’m partial to his writing style in general; avid Annelise fans will know that Chronicle of a Death Foretold was probably my favorite book I ever read in an English class (I wrote my IB HL essay on it)! I just think his writing is gorgeous, and I love the way he balances this journalistic tone with poetic liberty and the occasional enhancement of magical realism to suggest that there are more things on heaven and Earth, Horatio, and this is no average multilingual parrot. Once I started taking notes, things would occur to me, and I’d flip back to earlier parts of the book, only to realize there was way more foreshadowing and symbolism to certain things than I’d noticed before. The writing alone would give this book five stars to me—but I had to reconsider as I got further into the book, and things got more and more disturbing and downright disgusting. I’ll recount some of these notes now.

The first time I had to set my book down and dump all my thoughts as quickly as I could into a Google Docs on my phone, it was because of one scene with Florentino Ariza (who, despite being in love with the same woman since he was a teenager, recall, has slept with just about every woman he’s ever met). He’s wandering around during Carnival when he meets an enchanting young woman that—you’ll never guess—he wants to sleep with, part of his self-proclaimed “adventures in falconry.” She tells him straight up that she is crazy and from the insane asylum, which he interprets as a witty jest, before claiming that “the night was a return to the innocent unruliness of adolescence, when he had not yet been wounded by love.” Turns out this girl wasn’t kidding—she was an escapee from the insane asylum, who had that afternoon decapitated a guard with a machete. The guards find her and take her back, luckily for our Florentino, who may otherwise have been brutally murdered. Close call! Good thing he learned his lesson…except that afterwards, he spends weeks mournfully wandering the asylum with a box of chocolates, looking for his lost love.

There are a few key things this showed me. Firstly, the most obvious lesson of the book: love, for Florentino Ariza, is something inherently violent, obsessive, and deranged. Secondly, the greatest motivation for Florentino Ariza, the tragic romantic, is not love at all. It is fear: his fear of aging, and his fear of death. This should have been apparent to me from the very opening sequence of the book, wherein the never-again mentioned Jeremiah de Saint-Amour kills himself at the age of 60 to avoid getting older. Florentino Ariza clings to Fermina Daza for the same reason he buys several pairs of false teeth and 127 bottles of hair-restoring shampoo: because he clings to his youth, because he is single-mindedly focused on returning to the past. But we watch every single one of our characters decay in their old age and die: mostly comically, a life suddenly and farcically over. With these comedic deaths, García Márquez seems to laugh at Florentino Ariza’s fear. Age and death cannot be escaped, the author notes. How ridiculous it is to be so afraid of it that you never live.

This brings us to Juvenal (what could this name signify, I wonder?) Urbino: the doctor. First of all, I have to point out the irony of people calling this book a romance between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza. I mean, the book is literally called “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and compares Florentino Ariza’s obsessive and destructive love to a devastating and disgusting plague that wrecked the city. Florentino looks and acts like he has cholera when he’s in love (including one scene when he has to flee a meeting with Fermina Daza due to some unsavoury, uh…bowel movements), whereas Urbino, Florentino Ariza’s foil in every way, is literally the doctor who cures the city of the disease. Compared to Florentino Ariza’s feverish love, Urbino is portrayed as a cool and stable partner who truly loves and respects Fermina Daza for who she is. Through the relationship between YoungYouthful McCityBoy and StrongStable NobleLady (García Márquez is not too subtle with his naming conventions), we learn another major theme of the book: true love is not found in fiery passion, but it is built with intention and trust. In the beginning, Juvenal Urbino establishes himself as a noble man who truly respects Fermina Daza, a contrast to basically every other man in the book. He even—shocking! revolutionary!—shows himself to respect women as full human beings in general through his comfortable banter with Fermina’s Daza’s cousin early on, before their relationship is established. During their honeymoon, Juvenal Urbino doesn’t force Fermina to consecrate the marriage as she expects he will, but instead treats her gently and allows her to have autonomy until she is completely comfortable. This idea of women feeling forced into sex after marriage despite fear and discomfort also, obviously, plays a pretty serious role in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, so again, my intertextual interpretation has to be that García Márquez is drawing attention to machismo and the lack of autonomy and independence for women in his society, painting the patient and respectful Juvenal Urbino (a rich, handsome doctor!) as a sharp contrast.

And for a little while, things look to us to be pretty good for the newlyweds. But it’s not as good as it seems. Skip ahead a few chapters, and we get the first look into their real married life, post-honeymoon. This is the first time I feel like we really see their marriage as a bad thing. It’s clear they didn’t marry for love from the beginning, of course, but the honeymoon montage makes it seem like they found love pretty quickly anyway. The first ten years of their marriage, though, is spent in monotonous agony, both of them trapped by society, Fermina Daza feeling imprisoned and sure that she made a mistake. I think the implication here is that in the beginning, they didn’t try to build true love, they didn’t try to form one identity, they instead believed that real liberation came from staying in a marriage but maintaining separate identities and their own passions. When Fermina Daza finally loses it, goes to Juvenal Urbino, and tells him of her unhappiness, it’s like opening the floodgate to the truths they’ve been keeping hidden, because they’ve been keeping their inner lives separate from each other. And here, again, we get the romantic hero: Juvenal Urbino’s response is to sell everything they have—rejecting the idea that he only married for convenience and to build up his own external image of abundance, prosperity, and success. This is the only reason he married her, and the only reason she married him, but despite ten years of loveless marriage, somewhere, somehow, their love—or their ideal of love—must still be more important to them than everything they’ve built fiscally and socially. 

Later, there’s a scene where Juvenal Urbino visits Florentino Ariza to ask for a donation to his musical endeavors, and then randomly starts rambling about how much he loves his wife and how she supports him and he would be nothing without her and she also loves the same things he loves…sounds like they’ve worked things out. Her relationship with Juvenal Urbino makes so much more sense. Maybe the scenes with Juvenal Urbino are supposed to be indicative of how he is stable but boring compared to Florentino Ariza, as many reviewers seem to believe, but I struggle to see it that way. He shows his love for Fermina Daza in simple, predictable ways, but always with a very clear understanding of who she is and what she actually wants and needs. Again: love is built through intentionality, not found through passion. 

In fact, all love is like that, not just romance. When Fermina Daza has her son, she’s horrified that she doesn’t immediately love him just because he’s her son, as she thought she would. Instead, she initially feels no attachment to him whatsoever, and when he’s born, she feels the relief of having something foreign be removed from her. “But in her loneliness in the palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.” (207) I didn’t pick up on this the first time I read it, but once again, García Márquez is emphasizing that the instant, dramatic whirlwind of love that we value in our stories is not true love: true love is built by knowing, and desiring to know a person—in every type of relationship. 

Unfortunately, García Márquez, in his fervent pursuit to destroy our romantic pedestalization of love down to its most raw and ugly roots, also brought a sudden crashing death to my own dreamy interpretation of Juvenal Urbino when it’s revealed that he had an affair with another woman, in a sequence that’s pretty weird and vulgar. Of course, it’s supposed to be. As a reader, I found this unforgivable. As a character, Fermina Daza didn’t. After some weeks of bitter rage where she lives with other family, she realizes that she just misses him, and goes home. Is this an antifeminist ending to this season of their lives? Probably, I don’t know. But it’s also a very real one. Florentino Ariza definitely isn’t the romantic hero, but neither is Juvenal Urbino, and Fermina Daza—for all her charms—is also just a woman, with plentiful flaws and vices. Love flattened to the scripts of dramatic poetry is not really love at all.

As I attempt to unravel the feminist merits and losses of this book, I must return again to falconry. García Márquez makes good use of the same quote that appears in Chronicle again in this book: “The pursuit of love is like falconry.” Our boy Gabe sure loves his birds. But—and call me a bad reader—I don’t think our conclusion from two tragic books filled with unnecessary death caused by predatory “love,” is that the pursuit of love should be like falconry. In Chronicle, there are major themes of machismo, the power imbalance of marriage, the double standards of promiscuity in men being considered honorable and admirable, while in women it is life-ruining, … I could go on. Why would this book be any different? We definitely are told to pay attention to the farce of machismo. Florentino Ariza considers his STDs as the glories of war and trophies of victory, and claims any man would think of them as such. Earlier in the book, García Márquez also describes the Colombian men in the city as being proud of their testicular hernias and thus unwilling to treat them, to Urbino’s frustration. Their stupid pride is so obviously ridiculous that it becomes satirical, and the reader is forced to wonder what other foolish customs are maintained for the sake of false pride and honor. 

I know García Márquez is far from perfect in his treatment of his female characters. He’s definitely at fault for the objectification of women in his books, and his portrayals of prostitution and sexual violence are very questionable. But he also makes a strong point of female liberation and empowerment in this novel, to my reading—both in their romantic and sexual exploits, and their rejection thereof. Fermina Daza is the obvious example of this; her relationships are always on her own terms, and she is a strong, fiercely independent woman, whose flaws flesh her out as her own character, rather than allowing her to be either the innocent damsel or the cunning seductress. The character of Leona Cassiani also appears to me as a powerful female character, once again choosing to follow her desires rather than succumbing to what the people around her want. She climbs the corporate ladder with efficiency solely due to her own intelligence and hard work. Admittedly, this claim fails when we recognize that she uses her intelligence and power to lift up Florentino Ariza due to some misguided affection for him, which is an unfortunate decision, both for the storyline and for feminism… but this is still her own choice, and it proves that everything in Florentino’s life comes from the strong women around him. Although Leona is initially attracted to Florentino, she eventually rejects him in his advances somewhat brutally: because of all her work to elevate his career, she now regards him as a son. Again, this serves to paint Florentino Ariza as childish and incompetent. This is also the first time he realizes he can be friends with a woman without sleeping with her—a blessing for many women in the city, I am sure. (My original notes here include the epigraph, “ew, he’s so gross!!”) 

But it also draws attention to the role motherhood plays in the story, something I could dive deeper into if I hadn’t taken up three pages already. Florentino Ariza’s mother lives vicariously through her son, encouraging his unhealthy fixations. Juvenal Urbino’s mother nearly tears apart his marriage. The relationship between mother and child is explored in both negative and positive lights. Later, I might go back and explore this further—right now I don’t have enough evidence. Stay tuned!

Although I clearly enjoyed this book, and found rich depth to its symbolism and themes, I don’t know how to rate it. I think I’ll give it five stars by virtue of how good the writing was and how deeply it made me think, but honestly, there were a lot of parts that were so disturbing that I wish I could just forget them, so I can’t in good conscience recommend it. And again, since I feel that my interpretations differ from the vast majority of readers, I am forced to question whether I am glossing over the true horror of the author’s intentions: to write a simple love story. There are a lot more themes in my notes that I could elaborate upon (race relations, the past and nostalgia, and Why Florentino Ariza Sucks: The Expanded Edition), and maybe I will later. But for my final thoughts, I want to tie this in to relevant modern-day questions. Romance is a booming genre right now, and as much love as it gets on BookTok, it also receives hate and criticism. I’m not against the romance genre in concept, but one of the major complaints is the glorification of abusive relationships in popular media right now. If people are reading this book seventy years later as a love story, what does that say about what we seek in relationships and what we view as love? Why are people looking for these kinds of stories at all—what can be traced back as the root cause? Looking at the trends in literature during certain periods of crisis can give us clues as to what we are afraid of, what we are lacking, and what we are longing for.

direct quote (I think) from "El Amor en Los Tiempos de Cólera," by Gabriel García Márquez