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The book focuses mainly on the love between Florentino and Fermina. Joanna OrzelHLW-32/18/10Book ReviewA genius of literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes an amazing story of love, its symptoms, actions, and influences in a person's life. Marquez is a Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature, and with good reason. The reader will delve into the personal lives, affairs, and events of all the characters in the story. Some of the words were also challenging; this may just pertain to young high school readers, like me, who do not have a well-built vocabulary. He is an enchanting writer, twisting together words and plot lines in an alluring format.
While some parts of the plot get graphic, it is only in certain points and it helps to illustrate and carry across the love that the author is trying to portray. In the novel, he is trying to accomplish telling the story of many different types of love, from the love of Florentino and Fermina, to the romance stories of different characters intertwined in the plot. It also touches on love that is illegal, adulterous, dangerous, and passionate. The style that he writes in is often called magical realism, for the themes and the sub-plot occur and are present in real-life, but the way by which he describes it all is full of extraordinary circumstances and fantasy. Marquez gets the point of the story across very well. The book is somewhat difficult to read because the plot moves slowly and takes patience and determination to get through.
If the reader is looking for a beautifully written, breath-taking, detailed novel that attempts to understand and explain the infinite concept of love, this book is perfect.
However, I stuck with it and continued, very painfully, to read this book to the end. I have to say, I think Oprah and I have very different literary tastes. I was hoping that as a selection of Oprah's Book Club, that it might, in the end, have some redeeming qualities. However, I have not read many of her selections, either.I found Love in the Time of Cholera to be quite tedious to read. I did not care for the main character, Florentino Ariza at all and felt him to be a disgusting person. There were none. It ended just as poorly as it begun, and wasn't pleasant at all along the way.
I did not like this book. I found it boring and almost porographic in places.
A genius at the top of his game. Reminds me of a Bach variation where you are just dazzled by the beauty of it, but you also know that there is a structure underneath that will reveal itself in an amazing way as the piece closes.
After all, it's magic that counts in a novel like this. 622/53= 12 (about) girls a year for long term liaisons as claimed by Ariza.
Love is the hinge on which a vast human theater is holding on--passion, poverty, war, disease, small town politics, bad breath, body odor, reality of old age, human complexes that make us human etc.This is a novel without an end, and without a demarcation line, and I guess that's make it more enjoyable.However, I often found the book too long-winding. Certain detail was little too slow coming and reaching to a point.
Just finished reading it.Enjoyable, poetic, and fine taste of magic realism.At first, I set out to read a love story--instead, bit by bit, it became a meditation, a dream, and a painting.Nobody will ever know what exactly went through author's mind, and any decent art-work is subject to audience's interpretation.But one thing I am sure, it's not about love per se. However mathematically/biologically speaking the number seems kind of odd.
Yet, I must give credit to Mr Garcia for excellent style of prose--I call it delicious-word-cooking.A new writer could learn a lot about story-telling from this book though.I have yet to read his most widely known "One Hundred Years Of Solitude."One reviewer commented on lacking the theme LOVE in the book.Without going into too in depth about "symbolism" and similar literary bs, I express humble opinion that in this book, love is an excuse to explore many colors of human canvas, pure and simple.The words of Garcia are beautifully arranged--and the way he uses dry humor is also enjoyable--very similar to tragic comedy. What is nice that the encounters he attributes to Mr Ariza do not seem impossible.
Can you have long term liaisons with 12 girls in one year, and break up and have 12 more LONG TERM liaison next year for 53 years.You do the math.For an artist like Mr Garcia, this small mathematical reality may be irrelevant. And Garcia is a good magician of words--or should I say Merlin of words.
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