Love in the Time of Cholera in 100 books to read before you die

Jan 22, 2023 Dominic rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: my-favourite-books, colombia, nobel-prize-winners, magic-realism

This was a beautiful book and has found its way onto my "favourite books" shelf. I think I may even have enjoyed it more than 100 Years of Solitude, which I also adored.

It is a book about love yes, but so much more. A lot of reviews I have read have said that it isn't about love but about obsession. But I think that "love" doesn't fit into such a small and specific box, love doesn't always have to be beautiful and romantic, sometimes it is creepy and obsessive. This book is about love in its mul This was a beautiful book and has found its way onto my "favourite books" shelf. I think I may even have enjoyed it more than 100 Years of Solitude, which I also adored.

It is a book about love yes, but so much more. A lot of reviews I have read have said that it isn't about love but about obsession. But I think that "love" doesn't fit into such a small and specific box, love doesn't always have to be beautiful and romantic, sometimes it is creepy and obsessive. This book is about love in its multitudinous forms, and not all of those are healthy or beautiful to look at. In fact many of them are actually uncomfortable and depressing. Love makes people crazy, and it doesn't always look like the love in a rom-com or in another romantic novel, I think Garcia Marquez is much more honest about what love really means and what it encapsulates than many of us will admit even to ourselves, and no two "loves" are the same.

As well as the theme of love this book is also about time: the passing of time, and what that does to us. Does it change who we are? Are we the same people we were ten years ago? I know I'm not the same person I was before covid for example! This book has really made me think about this and look into what time does to a person. Some things fade with time, some are strengthened, others change entirely. Gabriel Garcia Marquez was in his late 50s when he wrote this book, so the aging process was something he was definitely coming to terms with and exploring in this book, he is quite a different person to the man who wrote 100 Years of Solitude almost 20 years before, and I think he knows it.

Apparently, this book was written after he read a newspaper article about an American couple who would meet each other every year until they were murdered when they were around 80. It turned out that though they had been seeing each other for decades they had both been married to other people. This story is briefly mentioned in the book itself and I think it beautifully captures all the complexities of the themes in one short anecdote.

This book will not be for everyone, it makes for uncomfortable reading at times, but overall it is a beautifully written novel which I feel I will have to come back to at some time to read again. ...more

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