A Reaction to Love in the Time of Cholera

Last night I finished Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And oh my god, how beautiful.

This isn't the first Gabriel Garcia Marquez book that I've read. I devoured One Hundred Years of Solitude back in college; I had a hard time figuring out what was going on at first and keeping track of all the Jose Arcadios and Aurelianos was difficult (it was good preparation for studying Roman history, in which all sons are named after their fathers in an unending line into prehistoric times....), but my god, it was gorgeous. The language, the muddying of reality, the brutality of war, of life, of the world. 

I decided to read Love in the Time of Cholera really on a whim. I saw it at Bookman's one day and bought it on impulse. I wasn't really looking for a new book to read. In fact, I was in the middle of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, knee deep in the behemoth fantasy series (I was halfway through A Feast for Crows, I believe). So I put Love in the Time of Cholera away until I had time to come back to it. 

I had trouble at first. The story was so meandering, filled with what seemed like trivial details. It started with an old man, Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Who was he? Why was he so important? Yes, he was a doctor, but where was the cholera? Or the love even? But once I hit the stride of the book, I fell in love. Maybe not as hopelessly as Florentino Ariza, but I was still smitten. Every other page had some beautiful poetic description of something so real, so mundane, that I wanted to start quoting it to people, to share some of the beauty of the details I was reading.

That's what I loved most. Love in the Time of Cholera described love, and especially married life, as I imagine it really is. The love described is real, as flawed and imperfect as the people feeling it. And yet, its never ugly or prosaic. Its beautiful and real at the same time. One of my pet peeves in life is people who claim that reality is always gritty, that by seeing beauty, one is really just ignoring reality. But Love in the Time of Cholera manages to do both. It acknowledges the reality of love, both disappointed love and married love, while still showing its beauty. Why is it so difficult for our tiny human brains to acknowledge the beauty of life while not denying any of its flaws?

Even the title of the book is perfect. I did wonder about the cholera part as I began. Where was it? Why in the Time of Cholera? But as I read, it became clearer. Cholera is all around; Dr. Urbino specializes in cholera, Florentino Ariza suffers from love as though its cholera, cholera epidemics are mentioned throughout the book, and cholera is finally what keeps love together in the end…and so even cholera becomes a backdrop for this particular love story, as death is the particular backdrop for all love stories, eventually.

Did I have any problems? Are there any minute pieces of criticism that I, a mere mortal, might offer to the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Only that I was a little unready for the ending, that I expected something more dramatic. And yet, the lives and loves that he had been describing throughout the book were undramatic. Real, yes, and beautiful, yes, but not dramatic. So really, the ending was as perfect as the rest.