Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

 

**This review contains mild spoilers**

In an effort to finish more books from my Classics Club list this month, I picked up Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. This book is one of the newer books on my list, having been published in 1985, but I'd heard enough praise about both the title and the author to feel comfortable with considering it a "classic." I started off my reading knowing nothing about the plot except what was on the back cover, and this turned out to be a mistake. I'm going to get myself into trouble with this review. I did not like this book, and I know that I'm in the minority with that opinion. Still, I write this blog to reflect on my own personal feelings, so I'm just going to record my honest experience here and brace for disagreements.

The plot is set in Colombia between the late 1800s and early 1900s. It follows two characters, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, who fall passionately in love with each other during their adolescence. Fermina's strict father does not approve of their relationship, so it must be carried out in secret. They get to know each other over the course of several years exclusively through letters and stolen glances at each other. They plan to sneak off and get married at the first opportunity, but when the moment finally comes, Fermina rejects Florentino. She realizes all at once that her feelings were infatuation and not true love, and she ends up marrying a wealthy local doctor instead.

Florentino is devastated by her decision. He believes that the love he feels for her is real and true, so he vows to wait for her husband to die so that she can come to realize the same. He is prepared to wait however long it will take and in the meantime, he begins a campaign of bettering himself. His plan eventually works, and he becomes wealthy and successful over ensuing fifty years. To fill the hole left in his heart from Fermina's rejection, he engages in a series of romantic liaisons with hundreds of different women. While he grows more attached to some of them than others, he always considers himself as belonging to Fermina. Eventually, the day he has waited so long for finally arrives. Fermina's husband passes away and he is free to pursue her once again, hopefully rekindling the love they shared when they were teenagers. 

I'll start with the positives. This was my first book by Márquez, and I was immediately impressed with his writing style. His prose is beautiful and like poetry to read. There is no doubt that this author has a special way with words. I also liked the general idea of the plot. Waiting so long for your one true love is a nice, romantic structure to hang a story around, and it and fits in well with Márquez's fairy tale-like, magical realism style of prose. Unfortunately, that's where my enjoyment of the novel ended, because while idea of it was lovely and the words he chose for it were lovely, the actual plot events and attitudes were not. There was a lot here I just couldn't get over.

I knew from the first chapter of this novel that I was uncomfortable with how Márquez wrote about women and sexuality. As the plot progressed, and the examples piled up, my discomfort only increased. A lot of this story has not aged well at all. The biggest example of this, and what bothered me the most, was the way Márquez romanticized rape throughout this story. This happens numerous times; rapes occur frequently, both perpetrated by Florentino and by others, and each time it happens it's treated as an expression of uncontrollable lust or love rather than a violation. One instance of this is Florentino's first sexual encounter. An amorous woman pulls him into her cabin during a boat trip and rapes him. It is an aggressive and impersonal act. Florentino never learns her true identity, and becomes obsessed with the mystery woman for the rest of the trip. He wishes for it to happen again. He continues to think about her fondly long after the voyage is over. This type of reaction to sexual assault returns again much later in the story when a female character is raped by a stranger when she was a child walking home one night. Afterwards, as she lay bloody on the ground, she is filled only with intense love for this stranger. She spends the rest of her life trying to find him again. 

Yet another example of this type of abuse of power comes when Fermina's original husband, Dr. Urbino, engages in an affair. He makes his first overture to this other women by touching her inappropriately during a medical exam he is performing. If something like this happened to me, it would be one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. The woman in this story, however, enthusiastically accepts his advances and it starts off their illicit relationship.

There are more examples than this. This is a pervasive motif throughout the novel that deeply impacted how much I could enjoy the text. These rapes are a male-fantasy version of assault where a man just can't help himself and the woman is okay with it (or vice versa). I couldn't overlook it.

Also difficult to overlook was Florentino's behavior as he makes his way through his sexual conquests. The way he describes encounters that were consensual were often rude or demeaning to the women involved. One woman, for example, he describes as an "uninspired lay." The way he writes about heavier women and older women was not flattering either. His encounters that were not consensual were extremely off-putting. At one point in the text, it is casually revealed that he raped a maid in his household, left her pregnant, and had to pay her off to keep her quiet about it. Márquez slips this into the text as an inconsequential side note, to contrast how weak he has become after suffering an injury. Other people in the story know about this and don't seem to care much. 

By far, the worst example of his behavior is in his grooming and rape of América Vicuña, a young relative sent to live with him for a time while she attends school. América is 12 years old when they first meet, and he sets out to molest her immediately. 

She was still a child in every sense of the word, with braces on her teeth and the scrapes of elementary school on her knees, but he saw right away the kind of woman she was soon going to be, and he cultivated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse.

América enthusiastically accepts his advances and falls deeply in love with him. When Fermina becomes available again, he breaks off their relationship. Devastated, América falls into a deep depression and kills herself. This is all narrated in a very poetic way, like it's a great romantic tragedy. Florentino suffers some pangs of guilt, but is reassured by the idea that no one will ever know his part in it. The fact that he completely destroyed a child's life is not explored; it's not the story Márquez is telling and América is treated as an accessory to Florentino's sexual desires, as nearly all the female characters in the novel are.

In exploring some of the reviews on Goodreads for this novel, I can see that other readers are very split when it comes to these parts of the story. Some, like me, react quite negatively to them. Others justify their inclusion by saying that Márquez intends for these sections to be this way. They claim that Love in the Time of Cholera is not a love story at all, but a sneaky commentary on the dark side of desire and relationships. Florentino is meant to be creepy and the story is meant to be disturbing. Love can be as insidious and deadly as cholera, as the title hints towards. This is probably true. I'm certainly no literary scholar. What I can say, however, is that I did not get the impression that this was a deliberate strategy to explore a dark topic while I was reading. Márquez's style of storytelling paints Florentino as a romantic hero, and his quest to win back the love of Fermina is very positively portrayed. I did not pick up on enough clues or comments to truly feel like this book was saying something else, especially considering how it ended. While I do think that Márquez was consistently commenting on the all-encompassing, sometimes damaging nature of love, I also feel that there are simply misogynistic and outdated ideas rooted deeply in this story. I couldn't forgive it, not even in the face of some intensely beautiful prose.

I found that once I was truly uncomfortable with the way Márquez wrote about sex and women, I was unable to get lost in the plot of the story. My brain constantly wanted to pick apart each sentence and analyze it negatively. I came to think that Florentino's love for Fermina more closely resembled obsession, and that his endless letters and strategies to win her heart were closer to stalking than courting. I haven't even gotten into the naked racism shown towards black characters, but that was there too. Once I got to the point where I was hoping América would reenter the story and murder Florentino for what he did to her, I knew that this book was a lost cause for me. 

Of course, I have classics-guilt now for feeling critical of this novel. Gabriel García Márquez has won the Nobel Prize for his literature and lots of people consider this novel to be a masterpiece. Surely I must be reading it wrong. In all likelihood, I probably am. However, the fact remains that whatever is special about this book did not reach me. I couldn't see it. All I could see were women being repeatedly placed into situations that robbed them of their power, their safety, and their dignity while the author called it love. 

I should have tried One Hundred Years of Solitude instead. 

Challenge Tally

Classics Club (#19 on my list): 83/100 books completed

Total Books Read in 2021: 3