Love In The Time of Cholera - review
May 7th, 2008Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Edith Grossman, Vintage Books, 1988.
Florentino Ariza was the poor, shy, bespectacled dreamer. As a youth he courted the girl of his dreams with serenades and secret anonymous letters. He lost when a mysterious high society doctor entered the life of the girl he loved. He would not get a chance to try again for fifty-one years, nine months and four days.
Fermina Daza was the tempestuous, self-determined girl with the beauty of a royal princess and the eyes of a panther. She had short shrift for men who loved from afar yet could not say what they mean. Fermina Daza’s father was a man of new money - ill-gotten, some said - who gave his daughter everything to propel her into the highest social strata, the ruling class. “I am not a rich man”, he would say. “I am a poor man with money. There is a difference.”
Dr. Juvenal Urbino was the dashingly handsome, educated, sophisticated prodigy of one of the country’s great old family names. He studied medicine in Paris. He grew to learn the whole world better, perhaps, than the whole truth of his own country, yet he followed a lifelong campaign of civic and infrastructure improvement. At the very beginning, Dr. Juvenal Urbino let it be known that he would wed Fermina Daza. Thus it was all arranged, and all Fermina Daza had to do was give her consent. She did.
In the following decades the newlyweds traveled the world, raised a fine family, survived an unforgivable breach of trust in the marriage, and settled down into the comfortable rust of old age. He told her: “Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” All might have still have ended happily, except for that wretched parrot.
For me there could have been no higher recommendation of this book that than of the lender, who lent it without reservations, as a critically prized treasure.
It is about life in a South American country, apparently Columbia, around the turn of the previous century. It is a tale of love among the rich and the poor, but mostly among the rich, in a social stratum which has disappeared as surely as the manatee, gone as surely as the life and forestation that used to teem on the banks of the Magdalena River. The slow-witted manatee was shot for sport, to near-extinction. The alligators were killed for sport and perhaps for their skins; the trees themselves were stripped from the denuded rain forest soil for the fuel to power the river-boats that plied upstream, searching for the next cordwood depot to fire their boilers on their journey.
Set against the backdrop of this period, “Love in the Time of Cholera” is not about specie conservation and forest management, though it is somewhat prescient (the original Spanish publication was in 1985) about ecological balance and the un-greening of the planet. While the dread cholera ravaged all the continents toward the middle and end of the nineteenth century, Marquez’ book is not really even about cholera.
Until you nearly reach the very end, it is hard to see whether the book is really about love, either.
And it is no more about “the time of cholera”, than this book review is really a review. Cholera is touched on - Dr. Juvenal Urbino is said to have campaigned tirelessly for a civic cleanup of the terrible sanitary conditions which promoted epidemic waves of the cholera bacterium. The enormous contrast between the ruling social classes and the squalid living conditions of the poor is noted as a fact of life, which, in that time, it was. The advent of hot air balloons, airplanes, railways, oil-fired steamboats, the telegraph and then even radio - all these are acknowledged, but in passing.
I detest the worn phrase “the human condition”, and nearly everything to which it alludes, but I would end up saying that this book is really about that condition, and that Marquez did a remarkable job of describing his perspective on it.
The book is about the souls of the principal players, told expertly by a master observer. There are surely many reviews of this stunning 1988 best-seller translation (also a 2007 movie); Wikipedia as usual does a creditable job with the synopsis and plot analysis.
What I want to touch on, instead, is what I know best: why I ended up liking the book, why I admired the author’s style, and why at the end I had to give Marquez his due for his incredibly introspective insights into human nature.
On a good day, I could give you scores of reasons why I disagree with the author’s metaphysical viewpoint on humanity, but on a very bad day I could only tell you that I was not so sure I could go as far as he in both understanding and damning human aspiration in the same breath.
I was not even sure, then, that I would like the book.
The people in it do not generally do things; they politely wait for things to happen to them, and then they blame others. Behind the mask of post-Victorian manners and politeness, we see that almost everyone lies, cheats and possibly steals: sometimes, worldly goods; mostly, souls. The dearer the victim, the more they turn the screw. And, of those who do not lie, cheat and steal, well, even there, there are lapses of human resolve.
Writers are often given to comparing layers of human personality to the layers of a vegetable, though it might be impertinent to suggest that they should know best. Not all of us come across so favorably in the comparison. Of course the domesticated onion is the favored vegetable for this analogy, perhaps because it has caused so many tears. Poets become lost in the rapturous mysteries of the unfolding petals of the rose, the daisy, the forget-me-not.
Personally, I am surprised we always forget the siren call of the unflowered artichoke, with its prized, edible barbed leaves and spiny, prickly interior. Of course the sweet delicate heart of the artichoke is the ultimate objective, the purpose of the whole exercise, and all of those outer leaves are best understood as the necessary exercise of the expected prenuptial ritual of conquest. The very act of eating the unfolding layers of the artichoke is a fine balance between high cuisine and choking to death on baby thistle.
To lavish so much attention on a domesticated weed seems frivolous in a book review, at first glance, but in keeping with the style of the book it would be indelicate to address the layers of human personality directly. Let us use the device of the lowly but emotionally neutral cabbage, whose full flavor is only appreciated in the company of other condiments.
So then, the cabbage is enfolded in layers of symbolic and literal meaning: the tough, fleshy outermost leaves protect the inner plant against the ravages of pest and garden. Call these the social petals. These are the only parts of the cabbage we see in the garden, and the only ones we strip off and dispose. The inner leaves might be our layers of deception, jealously, greed, pretense and fear. These are the layers of the cabbage that provide the heart core with security, safety, warmth and privacy.
Most of all, privacy! No one eats a cabbage by unfolding it petal by petal. Love changes all the rules. With a keen sharp blade, for better or worse, one slices the hapless plant as a geologist slices through the strata of time with his core samples: here, stripped naked, from oldest to newest, is the map of the entire life of the cabbage.
And so, as Love in the Time of Cholera unfolds the layers of human truth and meaning, it would seem we all live our lives enshrouded in the leaves of secrecy, in fear of being caught in discovery, and exposed in all our honesty or dishonesty. In this view, the mark of the successful person is only the superior ability to project to others a finer, more facile person than the fearful, ever-cautious deer mouse residing within each one of us.
Of course, I myself deny all this, or I would say that I deny it, and surely you too have no doubt that this may perfectly well apply to other unfortunates we have known. If we remain true to our conventions, whatever these may be, and, in the test of time, whatever they shall ultimately prove to be, then it should be entirely possible to live most of a long lifetime without ever being compelled to look inside the cabbage. So I, myself, once thought.
This review, like the book, is not about the “me” but exactly about any of us you might wish it weren’t. This loss of fear happened to come to me late in life as a sudden dramatic certitude. It was not always so. I hid in the long shadows of fear for decades, but even that held no equal to the terror of self-discovery. That is why our finest friends are often those who have the perpetual grace of not asking too many questions.
It seems impossible to determine who first observed that time is the great leveler, for civilizations have always known this, but older age strips off the leaves of the cabbage. The process is as inexorable as the glacier peeling the meat off the backbone of the mountains, depositing millions of tons of rock as the finest silts of time, into the rivers that bend and flow all the way down into the great ocean.
“Death has no sense of the ridiculous, above all at our age.”
It is up to you to find out how the marriage of Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino settles down into the sediments of the winding decades. It is up to you to follow the fate of the unfortunate and miserable Florentino Ariza, lurking like Gollum in a land of adventurous Hobbits. It is up to you to judge whether, by keeping his 622 clandestine affairs highly secret, he had remained “faithful in spirit” to his lost love. It is up to you to find out what happens when one waits out a pointless shadow existence for fifty-one years, nine months and four days, only to see whether there can be love in the time of cholera.
In the twenty-first century we learn that it is better to seize the moment, capture the day, and proactively build our futures, while politely seeming to wait for the others, or even cheerfully hurrying them along. We do admire decisiveness. We do not wait for things to happen to us, and we exchange knowing nods regarding those who do. But even as we renovate the whole house, it is in the basement that the archaeologists will find the most interesting material if we do not find it first.
It just does not seem plausible that the story of Love in the Time of Cholera applies equally to all of us. It is in the basements, if you will, hiding the dusty parts of ourselves left behind with no hope of catching up, that we find the truth of Socrates’ admonition that the unexamined life is not worth living. There is no terror like that which has not yet been confronted.
“How noble this city must be, for we have spent four hundred years trying to finish it off and we still have not succeeded.” — Dr. Juvenal Urbino
“I have never been able to understand how that thing works.” — Fermina Daza, on the male conjugal member
He: “I think I am going to die.” She: “That would be best; then we could both have some peace.” — on marital discord
“It is better to arrive in time than to be invited.” — Florentino Ariza
And, finally:
“They can all go to hell”, she said. “If we widows have any advantage, it is that there is no one left to give us orders.”
And so it comes in our time, each of us, to celebrate the safe passage of the ancient rocks and whirlpools, to summon the serenity, grace and courage to make our peace with the world in our own way, and to sail once more on the river with a love of the passing world in our heart, forever and ever.
You can read the plot outline on the back cover of the book. I gave nothing away. By reading the book you can see what Gabriel Garcia Marquez saw. I heartily recommend it.

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Some unrecorded number of years ago, struggling to come up with ideas on how to present Summitlake.com to our readers, I wrote in 
Kauai, the name of my favorite island in the Hawaiian group, comes from an ancient time and people, and possibly from an older language language, from an ancient and prehistoric strata of place names stretching back way before King Kamehameha and Captain James Cook.
The North Fork of the North Fork of the Yuba River underwent the scrutiny of the California Board of Geographic Names in the mid-twentieth century.
It is found in the Androscoggin watershed, feeding the Rangeley Lakes where I fished as a boy. The word is Indian for “moose feeding place”. We visited “Pond In The River“, pictured at left, south of Middledam. Place names could be very practical, too.
In particular, we mostly avoided the European process of naming and renaming places to honor political correctness and toady up to political patronage. Of course, there were many blatant exceptions, and some very understandable ones as well. Cape Canaveral was renamed to honor our President Kennedy, and there were few who could take exception to that, except perhaps for the precedent that wasn’t really a precedent at all. I note that the media have taken to calling it by its old name again, though I’m not sure of the division of labor: there’s the city of Cape Canaveral, and
Of Native American names, Stewart shows that there was a semi-codified procedure for name-giving, and rule #1 was: if it had a local name before, use that name on the maps and charts.
Similarly, with the mountains, once we were done with Pike’s Peak, Mt. Whitney, Mt. Ranier, the Appalachians and the most prominent or historical high-rise landmarks, there were thousands upon thousands of smaller mountains. My favorite, not noted by Stewart, is Painted Lady (King’s Canyon): its rich red bands really looks like a reclining lady in somewhat risque repose.
Day 13, Captain’s Log, Lieutenant Diem logging: We laid poor Captain Anderson to rest today in this hellish place. He died of multiple heat strokes despite the extra water rations and such precious shade as we could find. The ground here, if you can call it ground, is baked like bricks in an oven. The heat shimmers on the surface of this plateau at 122 degrees. There is scarcely any relief at night. Despite the TerraSat surveys they sent us before communications went out, there is no water to be seen anywhere. The men cannot go on like this much longer.


