Love in the Time of Cholera in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

May 23, 2016 Leslie rated it it was ok

Shelves: 2016-reads

Beautiful language, but I struggled with it. I'd seen it billed as romantic, but obsessive unreciprocated love is not romantic to me. In the end I didn't have too much of a problem with that, as the author himself didn't really seem to be making claims that this is a great romance. I actually liked the ending, after spending most of the book bracing myself for an ending that was going to make me angry.

(view spoiler) Beautiful language, but I struggled with it. I'd seen it billed as romantic, but obsessive unreciprocated love is not romantic to me. In the end I didn't have too much of a problem with that, as the author himself didn't really seem to be making claims that this is a great romance. I actually liked the ending, after spending most of the book bracing myself for an ending that was going to make me angry.

(view spoiler)[Even though the two main characters did end up together it didn't make me mad like I thought it would if that happened. To recap their story: when they are very young, he sees her, falls in love instantly (eye roll), they enter into a furtive correspondence and get engaged without ever having a real conversation. Her father figures out what's going on, doesn't approve, sends her away, they find a way to keep up the correspondence anyways. When she comes back after a couple years and after having grown up a little bit, she sees him again and realizes she doesn't actually know him that well, and the bubble of her crazy youthful infatuation bursts. She goes on to marry somebody else, and they have a very long, mostly good marriage. Some issues, but overall she is pretty happy. When she is old her husband dies and the first guy, who has been pining for her all his life whilst carrying on dozens of illicit affairs, who she hasn't spoken to this whole time, shows up on the day of her husband's funeral and declares his love to her, showing zero respect for her decades-long marriage or for her grief. She sends him packing, but she does read the many letters that he sends her for the next couple of years, and eventually they do become friends, and eventually end up romantically involved again. Nothing about this story is romantic to me. It's all about how HE feels, and the image of her that he has built up in his head without really knowing anything about her or what she wants, and frankly without caring much about that. So given that, I expected to be supremely pissed off when they ended up together, but I actually wasn't. We get to see inside her head pretty clearly that she doesn't actually think that she was in love with him way back when, that she is frustrated with his sentimentality and refusal to move on. However, the friendship that they strike up in their old age (once they actually get to KNOW each other) really is meaningful to her, and there was a complexity and nuance to their relationship that didn't allow me to just angrily write it off. Better than expected, in the end. (hide spoiler)]

There were some very casual, offhand references to rape, in one case committed by the main male character, that left me feeling pretty queasy. Also, he grossly takes advantage of a young girl who is placed under his care (she's 14 when he's maybe 70), and that was all just terrible. So...that's pretty hard to look past. I'm really tired of having to excuse this kind of thing with "oh it was a different time" or "oh that culture has different attitudes about sex." The young girl was written as being pretty into it and falling in love with him but when he first seduces her there's a reference to leading her to the slaughterhouse, so a) that language definitely implies that the author knows there is something not okay about it no matter if he writes her as later liking it and b) this was written by an old man so no, I don't exactly buy his view of that scenario.

It took me a long damn time to get through this book. Some of that was because of the issues I had with it, but honestly mostly it was because the chapters went on forever, and there weren't any page or section breaks within the chapters. My attention span isn't great, and that made the book seem about three times longer than it was. ...more

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