Love in the Time of Cholera

⚖The case for it

Marquez moves from "the mundane to the sensual in the blink of an eye," and the sentences carry so much physical detail that readers describe eating rather than reading. What the book is actually about is aging, "a book about aging written in some of the strongest prose," honest about what desire looks like in a body that has stopped cooperating. The scene where the elderly Dr. Urbino confesses an old affair to his wife is the one people name. Sympathetic readers take Florentino's fifty-year wait as a study of love curdling into obsession rather than as romance, discomfort built in on purpose. "Never read a book more than once, except for this one."

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Florentino waits fifty years for Fermina and accumulates 622 liaisons while waiting, which readers point out is not the same as devotion: "his obsession borders on the creepy," and the narration never once condemns it. Then there is America Vicuna, the fourteen-year-old ward he takes as a lover, the detail that ends the argument for most people: "I didn't find Florentino loathsome until his pedophilia." Fermina stays cold and underwritten beside him, leaving nobody to hold onto. The middle drags, with readers reporting stalls around page two hundred. One retitles the book on the way out: "Dysfunctional sexual obsession in the time of Cholera."

— the honest librarian

7h

honest hours

10

sittings