Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The book’s title is odd but accurate. It’s about love and is set in the Caribbean coast of South America between the middle of the 19^th and the early 20^th century when cholera was an ever present threat at least to the poorer communities.

The story moves backwards and forwards in this period exploring aspects of love. Fear not of apparent spoilers below – what happens is set out early and it is the how that engrosses.

To start (chronologically) there is Fermina Daza’s schoolgirl fixation on the plain but enigmatic Florentino Ariza, which he reciprocates in spades. She moves on, to be wooed by the sophisticated Dr Juvenal Urbino, and we see young married love bloom then fade to indifference under the pressure of in-laws; adultery rears its loveless, lustful head.

Meanwhile Florentino Ariza holds a torch for Fermina through the years, decades even, taking comfort where he can in his many affairs but unable to give of himself in his pitiful state of unrequited love.

Eventually, in old age, Dr Urbino suffers a parrot related death and the widow Fermina is revisited by her childhood suitor. Will this lead to a companiable friendship; a late flowering love; or a final crushing rejection?

The episodic time-shifting story meanders along like one of Ariza’s steamboats on the Magdelena River, with leisurely trips up tributaries and side channels. The long luxuriant paragraphs require unhurried reading but reward with total absorption into the time and place, and lives and loves, created by Garcia Marquez. It has passion and pain, joy and heartache, humour, irony and wisdom.

It reads longer than its 350 pages but is rich and satisfying throughout.