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 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 case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
