Hi friends, happy Monday, I hope you’re all well! Today I’m posting my review of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera.

Translated from Spanish by: Edith Grossman.

Love in the Time of Cholera by: Gabriel García Márquez: When they were young, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fell intensely in love. For Fermina, it was just a first love, but for Florentino, it was his true love and he’s determined to do whatever it takes to get her back, even waiting over fifty years. When Fermina’s husband passes away, Florentino makes a point to attend the funeral in order to get back in her life to tell her how he feels. This novel was different from what this reader is used to. It was a beautiful idea and concept, but the execution was less than stellar at times. Every time the reader thought about giving up on this, it would get good and something would bring the reader back in and it fell into this sort of pattern. The writing had moments where it was dense to get through. There were these long passages of what one of the characters were doing at a certain time and it really didn’t feel like it benefited the plot or progressed it any further; it was just added background to give us more on these characters, but this reader didn’t feel it necessary. Also, the fact that this switched who’s point of view we were reading from without notice and from paragraph to paragraph left for a confusing read. It didn’t help that the pacing was slow so moving through this could be a bit of a slog. It felt like there could have been a good love story here, but because it was hard to wade through all the prose and because the reader didn’t care for one of the main characters it made for a strange love story, if you can call it that. As for the characters, they were interesting, this reader didn’t really like them, especially Florentino Ariza because of his obsessive, almost creepy-like way he tried to get with the other main character, Fermina Daza. The one thing though is they were well developed as we got to see them grow through the course of this novel. From their youth, to their old age we follow these characters, some go through more of a growth than others, but that still didn’t change this reader’s mind on them. In the end, there was some really beautiful writing in this, but plowing through to find it might not be worth it. The twists and turns were interesting and that’s what kept this reader invested until the end because they truly didn’t know how this was going to end. This wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either.