Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman

“All that was needed was shrewd questioning, first of the patient and then of his mother, to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.” Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Basic Plot Summary: Florentino and Fermina were in love when they were young, but then Fermina marries Dr. Urbino. Florentino is convinced that their love is true (or at least his love for her is true) and commits his life to waiting for Dr. Urbino to die so that they can finally be together. In the meantime, he builds his business career and has affairs with hundreds of women.

The book begins with the last day of Dr. Urbino’s life. We then travel back to when Florentino first lays eyes on Fermina and their brief and simple love affair. We then steadily move forward in time to how Fermina and Dr. Urbino came to meet and marry, how Florentine bided his time until he could be with Fermina again, and then we come back to after Dr. Urbino has died and Florentino has approached Fermina again.

My Reaction: You guys have no idea how excited I was to read this book. I read Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in high school and fell in love with it, so I had high hopes for Love in the Time of Cholera. From the summary on the back of the book (similar to the plot summary above) I had a very different expectation on what some of the relationships would be like in the book, but I wasn’t disappointed that I was wrong. The way the relationships were written gave the characters more depth and made their interactions more complicated and fraught with emotion.

I felt like it also was an accurate representation of a lot of relationships between young lovers, which surprised me a little. I expected the relationship between young Fermina and young Florentino to be represented much differently in the book, though I’m glad it was written how it was. It showed an intensity, but a rather immature intensity and showed how easily broken they are. It was also interesting to read about the marriage between Fermina and Dr. Urbino, because it represented a different type of relationship between a man and a woman; perhaps less traditional (or maybe more traditional in the time period in which the story is set), but not unhealthy. Mutually beneficial and not necessarily loveless.

The relationship that surprised me most of all was that of Fermina and Florentino after Dr. Urbino died. At first it was exactly what I expected it to be, but then, because of who Florentino is as a person, the relationship started changing. IT wasn’t necessarily a bad direction, just one that I didn’t expect, and I’m not sure I like it better than what I was expecting, as I did with their relationship when they were both young. Part of me feels like Fermina wouldn’t have changed her stance on her feelings towards Florentino, but I also dont’ know what it’s like to be a widower in that time and place and how it would feel to be alone after decades and decades of marriage.

Overall, I definitely give it a 10/10 and can’t wait to read the last book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez on my list. In my opinion he is a brilliant author who weaves complex and wonderful stories.

Read on!

Molly

Finnegans Wake

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

“And still nowanights and by nights of yore do all bold floras of the field to their shyfaun lovers say only: Cull me ere I wilt to thee!: and, but a little later: Pluck me whilst I blush!” Finnegans Wake, James Joyce.

So, in all honesty, I have absolutely no idea what on Earth I just read. There may have been some paragraphs in which I had a vague understanding of what might have been going on, but as a whole the book just went straight over my head. I borrowed the book from my library, so I only had three weeks to read it (and it took the whole three weeks to get through it), but I’d like to buy the book some day when I have more free time to read it slower and be able to annotate it.

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

“Then his head started to become a little unclear and he thought, is he bringing me in or am I bringing him in? If I were towing him behind there would be no question. Nor if the fish were in the skiff, with all dignity gone, there would be no question either. But they were sailing together lashed side by side and the old man thought, let him bring me in if it pleases him. I am only better than him through trickery and he meant me no harm.” The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

The Master

The Master by Colm Toibin

“It suddenly occurred to him that the best way of clearing this woman out of the room was by waving his two hands at her and making a noise as though she were a flock of hens or a gaggle of geese.” —The Master, Colm Toibin

I was surprised to see on the cover of this book that it was one of the 10 best books of 2004 according to the New York Times’ Book Review. This was before I read it, and my surprise was based solely on the fact that I’d never heard of it before. But let’s be honest, in 2004, I wasn’t reading books like The Master.

The Radetzky March

The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann

“He stood by the window, feeling quite astonished at the degree of unawareness that the world at large displayed of the changes in his household. Today he had neither breakfasted nor read his post. Jacques was laid low by some mysterious ailment. And life outside was going on as normal.” -Radetzky March, Joseph Roth

Invisible Man

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

This book is about this young, unnamed, African American man who is introduced to us as an invisible man who goes on to tell the story of how he became to be invisible, living in a hole. We follow him through the end of his college career to New York where there’s a civil rights movement going on.

The Well of Loneliness

The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

This book was the first book I had to read this semester for my Introduction to Women’s Writing course, which I mainly took because this semester the focus is on Gender/Queer theory. Written in the 1920s, it was the first lesbian novel published in the English language, and in some ways could also be considered the first transgender novel.

Beloved

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Yet another book read off of my list of 1001 books, and one challenge done off the 2015 Reading Challenge I am also trying to complete.

I picked this book up several months ago at a book sale at the public library near my college. I didn’t know what it was about or anything about it really, but I knew that it was a book on the list of 1001 I should read before I die (and will read before I die), so I bought it. It was an added bonus when I looked at the back and noticed that it had won a Pulitzer Prize so I could use it to complete one of the reading challenges.

Middlesex

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

I’m surprised that it took me (barely) less than a week to read this book because when I started it, it felt like it was going to take ages. When I read the summary on the back of the book, I thought it was going to be a book similar to Parrotfish, a book about a transgender teen. It was sort of similar, but not as similar as I expected it to be.

The God of Small Things

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

This is a book that I had to read for one of my classes a few years ago. However, I’m usually a terrible student when it comes to reading the books I’m assigned, so even though I had to write an extensive paper on this book, I didn’t finish it and often skipped ahead because that was the only way I could even attempt at keeping up with the lectures.