All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera. [loc. 1023]
Love in the Time of Cholera is the long and rambling love (or 'love') story of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza. They fall for one another as teenagers, and have a romantic correspondence by letter and telegram -- but never a conversation. When Fermina sees Florentino again after an absence, she realises she feels nothing for him, and rejects him. Instead she marries Doctor Juvenal Urbino, a young doctor determined to eradicate cholera, and they make a life together.
Meanwhile Florentino embarks on a life of promiscuity. Six hundred and twenty two affairs, plus casual (and not always consensual) liaisons too numerous and nameless to count. His worst conquest is saved for last: his young ward América Vicuña, who's a teenager when Florentino is in his seventies. "...he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse". [loc. 4548]
Still, he has to pass the time somehow until Fermina's husband dies: then he will 'have' Fermina. (The thought that she won't 'have' him never seems to enter his daydreams.) Between affairs, he becomes President of the Caribbean Riverboat Company, which destroys the ecology of the local river system in its insatiable greed for firewood to stoke the boilers. A metaphor, you say?
Though this is not a long novel in terms of page count, it felt interminable. Fifty years of Fermina's marriage (culminating in Dr Urbino's death while trying to catch his pet parrot): fifty years of Florentino's sexual predation. It's a sweeping saga that explores love in its many forms, and how an individual's definition of and perception of love changes as they grow older. But it also 'explores' racism, promiscuity, paedophilia, murder and suicide, misogyny, illness...
If we knew nothing of Florentino's story -- only that he reappears after Dr Urbino's death, and helps the widowed Fermina come to terms with her grief -- it would be a glorious romance. Sadly, I can't stop trying and failing to balance that romance with América Vicuña's fate.
I have never quite got around to reading Marquez, and I wonder if I would have appreciated this book more in the 1980s, when it was published. But surely even then I would have found the behaviour toxic? I will read One Hundred Years of Solitude at some point: I'm told there's more magical realism and less sleaze. Not yet, though. It'll wait.
“Love is the only thing that interests me,” he said.
“The trouble,” his uncle said to him, “is that without river navigation there is no love.” [loc. 2768]
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