32. Gabriel García Márquez - Love in the Time of Cholera

I apologise because it has taken me forever to finish last week's book by Gabriel García Márquez. The reason for that is simple, I had to travel to London to take part in training because I have received a promotion in Edinburgh. I will live here for a month, but I promise I will keep finishing the blogs. However, I can't promise they will be on time... 

This week's novel was Love in the Time of Cholera and like the previous book I read by Márquez I wasn't charmed by it. This time, however, I understood the story and the meaning of the book. The plot basically is that a young boy (Florentino Ariza) and girl (Fermina Daza) fall hopelessly in love with each other. Fermina then falls out of love just as quickly as a girl is typically said to change her mind. Florentino, however, will never be able to let her go. He declares that his love for her equals any disease, in particular the disease that goes around Colombia when this story takes place, namely: "(...) to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera." (Márquez 62).

Florentino then goes on to a life of succubus, or as he puts it: "The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not." (Márquez 183) He always keeps his sights on Fermina though, in the hope that one day her rich and successful husband Dr. Juvenal Urbino will die and that she will fall back in love with him, which he does at the beginning of the story. It seems to be a perfect romantic love story. The feeling I get from it though is that Márquez has taken it too seriously and he described all the events that follow their meeting in the beginning of their long lives in too much detail. I think this will be a common problem I have with Márquez, I simply do not seem to like the lengthy way he presents his story and characters. 

The thing that shocked me most, however, is the thing I will leave you with. The last affair 70-something Florentino has is with a 14-year-old girl. Let's see if this does not trouble your mind because this is how he describes making love to her: 

"She was no longer the little girl, the newcomer, whom he had undressed, one article of clothing at a time, with little baby games: first these little shoes for the little baby bear, then this little chemise for the little puppy dog, next these little flowered panties for the little bunny rabbit, and a little kiss on her papa's delicious little dickey-bird." (Márquez 295)