Book Review: Love in the Time of Cholera

This book has been on my reading list from so long and it took longer to finish reading it. 

Love in the time of Cholera would not have been a love story if I had not read it till the last page. Book gets too sadistic and exhaustively descriptive at times that I wanted to give up on it midway, but the writing style was so rich and fluid that it kept me going. I flipped through the pages of the book after completing it and realized it contained the maximum quotes and almost half of my book was underlined.

What spoils the magic in 'Love in the time of Cholera'

Whereas I was absolutely in love with the way words were flowing on the page in a very poetic and vivid style, the very same narration frustrated me when the new characters were sketched and disappeared after one long mention. I am not sure if I was amused even a tiny bit after reading at length about a parrot (pet) or Euclides (the treasure hunter) or even for that matter about cholera. Tales of cholera patients and surroundings were very (very) distasteful at times. I always assumed with the title that probably author wants to convey that love is like cholera but book misses out completely on to form a connection between the disease and love and assumes that reader will work it out.

Another spoiler for me was that it contained one of the most confusing names ever I had read in fiction. I literally was looking at the preface at times to remind that Florentino Ariza is the male protagonist and Fermina Daza is a female one. Dr Urvenil jubro – Dr Juvenil Ubro- okay I have finished reading the book but I still couldn’t remember his name. I re-checked it’s Juvenal Urbino.

These were the easiest ones. There is a Euclides, Aunt Escolastica, Hildebranda Sanchez and so on and so forth. Names were more of tongue twisters to a foreign reader.

Why you should still read it?

Book leaves an imprint on you for its unconventional strong ending. Fermina’s character touched me when she boarded the ship to freedom. Until then she was the creator of her own life. She picked Urbino over Florentino even when she loved him. Then, there is this so called lover Florentino whom I would have called a pyschopath. He goes on to sleep with every other woman with no conscience left at all inside, one of them he slept is killed by her husband and a teen one commits suicide but there he calls himself a lover. Probably a lover with a very selfish and cruel heart. 

It disappoints me all the more when Urbino goes on to confess that he married her not for love but to defy her arrogance. Seriously? I felt as if I was watching an Indian tele-soap at this moment but then I realized that this is what happen generally - brain malfunctions when heart conflicts. 

All of these botched up characters and incidents are forgotten when the two in love are at peace with each other in the end, when she rolls a cigarette or two in front of him and smokes like a diva, when they are just about to fall in trap of each other and she adds “If we are going to do it – let’s do it like grown ups

I literally wanted to whistle at that time and felt as if I was watching a piece of art.

Quotes <3

- Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer

- Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain

- There was no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age

- She had helped him to endure the suffering as lovingly as she had helped him to discover happiness

- The love affairs were slow and difficult and were often disturbed by sinister omens, and life seemed interminable

- Wisdom comes to us when can no longer do any good

- Resentments stirred up other resentments, reopened old scars, turned them into fresh wounds

- Barely healed wounds could begin to bleed again as if they had been inflicted only yesterday

- At that age you are half decayed while you’re still alive

- The people one loves should take all their things with them when they die

-The girl raised her eyes to see who was passing by the window, and that casual glance was the beginning of cataclysm of love that still had not ended half a century later.

- Little by little he idealized her with improbable virtues and imaginary sentiments, and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her

- Take advantage of it now, while you are young, and suffer all you can..because these things don’t last your whole life

- She reminded him that the weak would never enter the kingdom of love, which is harsh and ungenerous kingdom, and that women give them only to men of resolute spirit, who provide the security they need in order to face life

- His foundling’s eyeglasses, his clerical garb, his mysterious resources had awakened in her a curiosity that was difficult to resist, but she had never imagined that curiosity was the many masks of love

- Even if you are dying for fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.

- We’ll grow old waiting

-For as long as I can remember they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

- Requited love had given him a confidence and strength he had never known before.

- Reading had become the insatiable vice.