Critics Respond to Love in the Time of Cholera

For the past month, students in IB World Literature have been reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Originally published in 1985 and translated into English in 1988, this beautiful novel follows the decades-long love triangle between Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino. When the English translation was released in 1988, Thomas Pynchon and Michiko Kakutani had the following to say in The New York Times: 

The Heart’s Eternal Vow by Thomas Pynchon

Love, as Mickey and Sylvia, in their 1956 hit single, remind us, love is strange. As we grow older it gets stranger, until at some point mortality has come well within the frame of our attention, and there we are, suddenly caught between terminal dates while still talking a game of eternity. It’s about then that we may begin to regard love songs, romance novels, soap operas and any live teen-age pronouncements at all on the subject of love with an increasingly impatient, not to mention intolerant, ear.

At the same time, where would any of us be without all that romantic infrastructure, without, in fact, just that degree of adolescent, premortal hope? Pretty far out on life’s limb, at least. Suppose, then, it were possible, not only to swear love ”forever,” but actually to follow through on it – to live a long, full and authentic life based on such a vow, to put one’s alloted stake of precious time where one’s heart is? This is the extraordinary premise of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s new novel ”Love in the Time of Cholera,” one on which he delivers, and triumphantly.

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Garcia Marquez Novel Covers Love and Time by Michiko Kakutani

‘Love in the Time of Cholera,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s radiant new novel, is at once an old-fashioned love story, elegantly fashioned out of the clockwork pieces of romantic fiction (secret love letters, unrequited passions, noisy declarations of undying devotion and long, melancholy honeymoons spent at sea), and an anatomy of love in all its forms: the gushy, irrational love of adolescents and the mature love of people who have suffered loss and grief; the high-flown love, immortalized by poets, and the love without love found in bordellos and motels; marital love and adulterous love, spiritual love, physical love, even love that resembles cholera in its symptoms and its pain.

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