Love in the Time of Cholera
Fifty years of unrequited love, finally consummated in old age. Where One Hundred Years of Solitude is historical myth, this 1985 novel is intimate, erotic, comic, and deeply romantic. Garcia Marquez proved he could do more than magical realism; he could write a love story that earns every one of its pages.
Florentino's fifty-year devotion looks worse the closer you stand: six hundred some-odd affairs logged while he 'waited,' and an old man's seduction of América Vicuña, the fourteen-year-old ward whose suicide the novel files under collateral detail. García Márquez calls this love; you may call it stalking with good prose. Whether you can hold both readings decides whether the ending lands.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
