Book Report: Love in the Time of Cholera

Author: Marquez, Gabriel
Title: Love in the Time of Cholera
Place of Publication: Colombia
Company: Time Books
Date: 1985

Reason, Type and Setting: I selected this book because I heard it was really good, and I also like romance books. The genre of this book would be romance. The book takes place in Colombia in from 1880 to 1930.

Plot: The major conflict in this book is unrequited love. Florentino Ariza is madly in love with Fermina Daza which he meets when he delivers a letter to her house. They secretly start exchanging letters to each other and then Florentino proposes to Fermina. She says yes, but once her father finds out about the engagement he sends her away to live with her cousin, so that she will not be able to see Florentino. After a few years Fermina finally moves on, and then she marries a successful doctor. Florentino is still in love with her, and stays celibate because he only wants to be with Fermina. When Florentino meets Fermina again she rejects him because she believes the love they use to have was naive and not real. Florentino is heart broken and then decides never to marry. He then has numerous affairs with hundreds of women in order to ease the pain of being separated with Fermina. Many years pass and later on Fermina discovers her husband Urbino is having an affair with another woman. She goes to live with her cousin for a few months because she is so angry and hurt. Urbino finds her and convinces her he is sorry, and she decides to stay with him. Fermina and Urbino stay married for fifty years until one day while Urbino is trying to retrieve a household parrot from a mango tree, he falls and dies. After the funeral Fermina is in her home mourning. Then Florentino arrives and tells her he still loves her and wants to be with her. She is very angry because her husband has just died so she yells at him and tells him to get out. Later on they start writing letters to each other and they begin to have a relationship. The books ends with Fermina and Florentino falling in love, and staying together forever.

Character: Fermina Daza is really beautiful, and has long black hair and black eyes. She is smart, independent, and thinks for herself. She also loves animals and shopping. Fermina plays a large role in the plot because she is always in power of Florentino’s happiness and sadness. The decisions she makes change many people lives. I found Fermina interesting because she always does what she believes in, and she is smart and independent. The plot changes Fermina in many ways. In the beginning of the book she is very naive and innocent. She does not understand many things in life such as love. By the end her experiences make her into a wiser and stronger person.

Evaluation: Yes, I really liked this novel. I loved the authors writing style, and how he made flashbacks and switched time periods. This kept me interested through the whole book. The only thing I didn’t like about the story was how it took Fermina and Florentino so long to finally be together. I also didn’t like how Fermina decided to stay with Urbino after he had an affair because if he really loved her he wouldn’t have cheated on her. I think this book did inform me a lot because I learned more about the history of Colombia, and about the Cholera Epidemic which affected Colombia in the 1800’s. A connection I can make with this book and real life is that there are still epidemics that go one around the world, such as the Avian Flu. If I were to put myself in the plot I would have made different decisions than the main character. I don’t think I would wait 50 years for someone to fall back in love with me. I think I would have moved on after being rejected the first time. I liked the ending of the book, and I think it fits really well in the book, so I wouldn’t change it. But overall I think it was a really good novel.

Author, Context, Trivia: Gabriel Marquez also wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude and An Evil Hour. He was born in 1928 in a small town called Aracataca in Northern Colombia. He went to Jesuit College to study law, but then changed his mind and became a journalist. When he was 26 he was sent to Rome for an assignment for his newspaper. Throughout his life he lived in Barcelona, New York, Paris, and Mexico. He wrote many other books and screenplays, and also continued to work as a journalist. I plan to read more of his books in the future because I think he is a really good writer.