A Beautiful Tale of Love In Troubled Times
Overcoming problems with philosophy, poetry, writing and everything arts.
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By Kashish Shivani
First publised on 2021-01-04 02:40:05
About the Author
Overcoming problems with philosophy, poetry, writing and everything arts.
View all posts by this Author
Sale of books
which told tales of previous epidemics and pandemics that our world has faced
has increased in these troubled times. One among them is "Love in the Time of
Cholera" by Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
The book is based in Márquez's home country of Colombia in the late 1800s / early 1900s. It involves Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino as its main characters. To describe the brief journey of reading it, it was like a ride through beautiful settings, emerging into green forests, sometimes on a hot air balloon or a trolley led by horses. A journey that stood still in a lighthouse beside the beach. A journey that moved ahead on mulebacks, stupefied by the naked sun or drenched by the October rains.
With the rich and magical style of Marquez, you
would give in to let yourself be driven by beautiful analogies, wherever the
plot might take you. Sometimes in the midst of the story, readers might feel
Florentino Ariza to be a manipulative man, but his insanely deep love for
Fermina Daza gives us some of the best lines like, "Love is the only thing that
interests me."
This book shouldn't be read for its plot but rather for its splendid way of telling a simple story and converting it into one of the best love stories ever written. To initiate the story by a small incident of a secret love affair of Dr. Urbino's chess partner is a kind of declaration of the arrival of love that does not know any boundaries set by society. A kind of love that is felt in the story with something as little as, "Remember me with a rose" and with something as surprising as, "Florentino Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty three years, seven months and eleven days."
Another fascinating thing about this book is its character development, by the end of which readers would crave to converse, however briefly, with all the characters that contributed to this journey of love in the time of cholera. All the brief love affairs of Florentino Ariza are characters of volume, someone with whom you would like to talk about life, some with their own philosophies and others with their own worlds. All characters in sync trying to show us how difficult and different love can be. All the characters thinking about each other and about love, gives us a web of opinions and a bouquet of difficult talks to remember for life all under the shade of cholera.
"Love in the time of Cholera" is a beautiful gem which should be read to get lost in the dreamy world of Marquez and to taste the elixir of his style. The last few lines capture the whole of its essence that, "it is life more than death, that has no limits."
