Love in the Time of Cholera (Vintage International) (original 1985; udgave 2003)

The title of the book and the name of the author were known to me – and are no doubt known to many people – but I had absolutely no idea about the story. And while I’ve read and enjoyed some South American literature, it’s not a tradition that figures highly in my chosen reading. The book was, of course, on offer, and it’s also on the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, so I thought it worth a punt. And after a diet of far too much bad high fantasy, it was surprisingly refreshing to read prose by someone who could actually put a sentence together. An old man in a South American country dies. The novel then flashes back fifty years to a fifteen-year-old girl, who is being wooed by a young man of middling means. Her father takes her on a road trip to stay with relatives inland in order to block the relationship. When she returns a couple of years later, she finds herself suddenly no longer in love with her suitor. He, however, continues to love her. She marries an urbane and wealthy doctor who studied in France. The story then follows both her paramour, and the years – decades – he spends trying to get on with his life, while loving her from afar, and her own life. She is seemingly content in a marriage that gives her everything but love. Her husband is widely admired, which is all he ever wanted. And the old suitor has a string of jobs and affairs, none of which change him in any meaningful way. It gets distinctly dodgy some three-quarters of the way in, when the suitor takes charge of a thirteen-year-old cousin, and then makes her his lover. That’s straight up paedophilia. I don’t care when and where the book was set, and whether it was even considered acceptable in that time and place – and surely it wasn’t? – but writers choose what they write about, and García Márquez chose to write about a relationship between a man in his fifties and a girl not yet fifteen years old. As for the rest… the story jumps around a little, and I got a bit lost in the internal chronology – suitor works for the telegraph office, then he lives in a brothel, then he gets a job with a telegraph office, and somewhere in there he unsuccessfully tries to retrieve some sunken treasure… The novel revels in the filth and squalor of its setting – obviously the cause of the frequent cholera outbreaks which lend the book its title – and though ostensibly about love and romance, its female characters often feel like walking plot-points. The novel has its moments, but its blithe treatment of paedophilia, not to mention honour killings. or just plain indifference to the preventable squalor and deaths of the poor, make it a hard book to read in the twenty-first century. García Márquez’s other really famous novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude. I suspect I’ll give it a miss. ( )

Worth reading. Sometimes the detail of these lives, folded over and over exposing different aspects was fascinating, and at other times tedious. A fantastic (in the strange sense) ending. ( )

Giving up a bit shy of halfway. It aches to leave books unfinished, but I've decided that I have too many books queueing up to be bothering with books that can't hold my interest. I'd like to say I'll pick up where I left when I have some extra extra time to spare, but I doubt it.

I enjoyed One Hundred Years Of Solitude, I think it was 2009. It was weird and wonderous. But this just struck me as a soap opera, but then written more fancifully. I don't know if it's the translation (it is not very modern, but as I recall, neither was the other one, and in that novel (100y) the old fashionedness of the language worked), or the fact that I'm not used to reading Dutch translations anymore or the lack of a magical touch that I liked a lot in Cien Años or my tastes changing over the year.

I did enjoy certain passages, but I was never enthralled, I was never sucked in, I never really cared what was going to happen next. Maybe I've grown too cynical for books about undying love, but I was bored, and growing more bored. So I'm giving up. It's a shame, I always feel like I'm missing out when I don't enjoy a classic that so many others love. But I don't think I get through another 300 pages of this, without losing valuable reading time for other books that I will enjoy more (like I did last year by insisting on finishing The Shining). Sorry Gabriel.

In fact, I grew so weary of this story and its period drama dullness, that I had to grab an antidote, injecting a much needed 10cc of silly, my old pal Douglas Adams.

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I wish this had been a short story, or maybe a couple of them. I thought the beginning and ending were amazing, but the middle lagged, through repetition. And while the female characters are quite fascinating, they still remain in the shadow of the men. But at least I now know where the first John Archer book got its plot idea from. ( )

I first read this for a bookclub when I was 17, and I remembered it as a nice story, but nothing special. Then I reread it in college for two separate courses. Wow, reading it as an adult, it goes from being forgettable to cringe-worthy and gross.

The protagonist has a serious case of Nice Guy TM. Like take a 'No' and go away, dude. I hate this trope of the dude keeps pursuing the woman and eventually they end up together. It's rapey and icky.

And then there's the pedophilia. I don't know who decided that child-rape was fucking fancy, but WAY too much literary fiction has child rape in it. Towards the end of the book, the male protagonist adopts a pre-teen girl and they end up in a relationship. There is a part of me that wonders if maybe this was meant to be subversive (like maybe it was meant to critique the very trend I'm complaining about) bc the narrative was so over-the-top. He descibes this girl as having a "diaper smell" and really leans into the fact that she's so young. He infantilizes and sexualizes her all at once. I've decided that even if it is meant to be subversive, I'm not about it. While I was working on my M.A in English Lit, I had to read way more pedophilia than I ever wanted to. Just because something is taboo, that does not make it high literature. Between this, Lolita, Death in Venice, The Lovers, and far too many more, higher education has me child-raped out. I'm over it.

Then there's the whole "magical realism" thing. People love to call this magical realism. Why? Because of some ridiculous scene with a parrot and a doll that shows up from nowhere and has hair that grows on its own? Neither of those scenes were central to the plot at all, and I rally feel like the author jammed them in to be fancy-pants magical realism. Kafka's The Metamorphosis is magical realism, this is not.

And the story has nothing to do with cholera. The author just really wanted to put love and cholera in the title together to make the book sound way more dramatic than it actually is.

I gave it two stars because it is entertaining and kept my attention. No stars for anything else.
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