Tuesday 6 May 2014

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

He is gone, his books are not, there is no better way to remember him than through his books. So here it is my second reading of this masterpiece. A slow, emotional, touching one...

Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza fall secretly in love during their youth, a love made of letters, flowers, poems, a love at first sight that grew with time. But when a rich doctor (Dr. Juvenal Urbino) comes into the picture, this passionate love is forced to be put on hold, for more than 50 years...
And those 50 years you feel them all, coz the reading is for some sort of magic extended in time. I felt the last 100 pages lasted forever, every time I thought I was about to finish the book, still some pages where there to be read. And I think this is what can make you love or hate this book. Yes, this, along with the fact that nobody wishes to have to wait 50 years to embrace their love, coz you wish nobody sane would allow himself to such suffering for so long. But Florentino does, and I didn't feel for one single page to tell him to do otherwise.
As for every Márquez book, the engagement of different senses is the key, the first time Fermina and Dr. Juvenal Urbino make love are one of the most intense pages I have ever read on the topic, without rhetoric or explicit sexuality.


“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”


p.s. maybe one day I should convince myself to watch the movie adpted from the book, or maybe not...

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