Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez!

Of bitter almonds, timeless love and of magical GGM!!

Love in the time of cholera is yet another brilliant work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez tells the story in a style where every sentence is pregnant with metaphors, every other phrase is a pinnacle of poetic expression, every lie is a truth seen in a new light, every experience is picturized in a magical realism of which he is a master painter! To use such talent in his masterful way requires a genius apparent in all his works!

The story revolves around two main characters, Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, and is spread over three hundred and fifty pages that describe nearly half a century of love in its various forms!! A love between a school girl and a nervous suitor to the love between them at the dawn of their second childhood: and everything in between that takes the reader through lifes, loves, escapades, and homes of several protagonists. The maze is as charming as in his other novels, with profound insight on love strewn, as if nonchalantly between spreads of interesting digressions that keep one as glued to the book as the fancy wordplay. To me Marquez represents a writer whose each word is born out of multiple layers of thoughts and complexity, that must spring from his acute insights and multitudes of experiences.

One must wonder what role cholera plays in the novel. It plays the same role as love, presents similar symptoms and likewise leaves people dead in its wake. This is a saga of requited and unrequited love, of social and ethical love, of moral and perverse love, of greedy and hungry love as well as sensual and vulgar love. It is a love story with a happy ending, but like any real love story had characteristic mishaps and trauma, pains and predicaments, joy and sorrow. Hell sir, what do you expect in a book titled "Love in the time of cholera" if not the paraphrasing of a plague that inflicts the characters of this saga?

Leaf storm and other stories is full of shorter and more tangile words; The Autumn of the Patriarch is about a dictators life; his rise and decay and is incredibly (difficult yet exquisite) read while the Hundred Years of Solitude is I guess the best of the lot. I found Love in the time of cholera more accessible than his other works, allowing faster assimilation a grand buffet of Marquez' visions and an endless servings of vignettes. Never for the fainthearted readers, I believe Marquez' works are excellent exhibition of the glory of the written word and the timelessness of great writing! His novels move through space and time with amazing fluidity, capturing the essence of people living for maybe a whole hundred years, and providing the detail and drama that accomplies life with words that interweave lie and truth, imagined and real in a similar fashion as our own heads do!

Oh! But you wanted to know what the novel is all about, and its story or how good it is? Well then, stop looking at this review for an easier way out, just go and read the novel!:)

Read in June 2006
Review also on amazon!