I read Love in the Time of Cholera thanks to a commenter on this sub. Here’s my review.

Shoutout to u/blackturtlesnake for making the comment on u/towalktheline’s post that inspired me to finally check this off my TBR. Also tagging u/frankchester because they said they wanted to see my thoughts on it, though they hated it and I love it lol.

This review contains several spoilers.

I LOVED this book. I give it five stars.

First of all, and the main reason for the five-star rating: the language. It took me awhile longer to read than a book of that length normally would because the language was so beautiful and descriptive that I reread several passages multiple times to properly absorb each word. Every syllable was carefully chosen. Marquez punched me in the face with the first line, and this feeling continued through the whole book.

I also really loved Marquez’s use of nature to differentiate the economic classes — the rich viewed nature as an oppressor to be conquered, while the poor were part of nature. This culminates at the end, whenever the boating company that made Ariza rich is shown to have destroyed the ecosystem of the river.

I see a lot of criticism for the amount of sexual violence in this book, but I think that’s Marquez’s point, although it’s a crude way of making it. You’re supposed to hate Ariza. He’s a creepy rapist pedo stalker. It takes talent to make your audience despise your MC.

I also appreciated the exploration of the negative side of love. Love = disease = death, and true love and soulmates don’t exist. Love turns people into unrecognizable shells of their former selves. When Ariza first becomes involved with Fermina, he is a romantic who writes her love letters and brings her flowers and plays the violin outside her window. He’s a little bit odd, but you kind of feel sorry for him. By the end of the story, he’s a pedo rapist whose obsession leads to him praying for her husband to die. By the time Fermina becomes “his,” he’s old, bald, and creepy. Additionally, marriage leads to the women in the book completely losing their identities, and they only regain those identities upon being widowed. Another example of this is that the term “coup de grace” is used both to describe a killing blow and the moment of seduction.

Some other things about the book that I loved
-Fermina and cyanide have the same smell
-The really creepy number of parallels between Fermina and America
-Characters move away from God/religion when they fall in love
-Excrement is frequently used as a metaphor in a book about cholera (one of the worst ways to die, imo — I am so thankful for modern medicine!)
-Ariza doesn’t recognize what a terrible person he is — he views himself as a moral authority and the paramount authority on love, despite never having had his love requited, and writes treatises on the topics of love and morality while using younger women and widows to forget the woman he’s been obsessing over his whole life.

I want to look more into the historical backdrop of the book because I think I missed out on a lot of important context. I’ve also read that a lot of the book gets lost in translation, which makes me wonder how great it is in Spanish.

by supern0vaaaaa