Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is absolutely about love but it has nothing to do with cholera, other than that cholera was endemic in these parts at the end of the nineteenth century. These parts are never identified. This setting is certainly the northern parts of South America but definitely not Marquez's native Colombia.

We start with the suicide of a photographer of unknown origins. The doctor who views the body is an old friend who lent the unknown cripple money with which to start his business, a loan the recipient long since paid back. The doctor visits the suicide's mistress, a middleaged beauty. Then the doctor goes home, tries to get his parrot out of a tree, and dies.

The doctor is Juvenal Urbino, octogenarian, the most respected citizen hereabouts. Everyone who is anyone attends his funeral. The last to leave is Florentino Ariza, proprietor of the riverboat company, who for the first time in fifty years declares his undying love for the doctor's widow, Fermina Daza.

Half a century ago, Fermina Daza was a teenage beauty, new in town, her father having bought a tumbledown mansion there, having left his upcountry birthplace for mysterious reasons. At that time Florentino Ariza was developing his skills at the local telegraphy office. One day he delivers a telegram to the Daza household and catches sight of Fermina. He is instantly lovestruck. He follows her everywhere, writes to her every day, serenades her every morning.

Florentino's love is hopeless. He is the illegitimate son of a native woman who keeps a sort of all-purpose junk shop, whereas Fermina is the daughter of a man who obviously has money and aspirations. Senor Daza has nothing against Florentino but he wants his daughter to marry the nobly-descended Juvenal Urbino, which she does.

Florentino uses the next half-century to make himself rich and a great lover. He does this via his uncle Leo, who finally acknowledges the young man as the son of his late brother and who trains him up through every level of the riverboat company until, when Leo turns 100, Florentino takes over. Meanwhile Florentino has seduced and bedded dozens if not hundreds of women of all ages and stations, many of whom he remains on excellent terms with. One even helps him run the company.

And ultimately, a year or so after Dr Urbino's death...

The meaning of the book is not entirely clear. This is what makes it a great work of art. My own view is that Marquez is mapping out the reality of love as it subtly adjusts to the rigours of time in contrast to the ideals of romantic love and social convention, the former never changing, the latter never what society pretends it should be. It is a marvellous, magical book, written by a master at the height of his achievement, yet charming, tender and often hilarious.

For me it has been a beautiful read at a troubling time.

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It has to be one of the greatest opening lines in literature: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." Superb - and the quality does not diminish over the next 400 pages.


Ostensibly One Hundred Years of Solitude is the saga of seven generations of the Buendias, first family of Macondo. In many ways it is the same story, lived over again by succeeding generations.


The men are always (Jose) Arcadio or Aureliano. The Arcadios tend to be seekers after truth who end up going mad. The Aurelianos are more adventurous but equally monomaniacal.  Several of the women, notably the first matriarch, Ursula Iguaran, live more than a hundred years. Ultimately it all ends in near incest when Amaranta Ursula gives birth to Aureliano, son of her nephew Aureliano. The role of the matriarchs is to keep the house going. The women are either earth goddesses or professional virgins. The first Amaranta is a professional virgin; Renata Remedios, known as Meme, mother of the semi feral Aureliano who sleeps with his aunt, becomes a nun after the father of her child is crippled. Remedios the Beauty is so beautiful that one day she is simply carried off to Heaven. Her brother Aureliano Segunda searches the whole of Colombia for a woman very nearly as beautiful as Remedios. The high-born Fernanda bears him three children, eventually, but nevertheless likes to think of herself as virginal. Fernanda is the matriarch, especially since her husband a is living with his mistress, but in fact the house is maintained by her mother-in-law the long-suffering Santa Sofia de la Piedad. Aureliano Segunda's whore, Petra Cotes, is not the first immoral woman to become involved with the family. The third generation brothers, Aureliano Jose and Arcadio, both have sons by the local wisewoman Pilar Ternera, who outlives every generation, attaining the incredible age of 140. Colonel Aureliano Buendia - he of the opening line - has seventeen sons, all by different women, all called Aureliano, during his pointless military adventures.


Time, in Macondo, is more of a pool than a line. We are never told exactly when the hundred years begins or when it ends. We know that trains and movies ultimately arrive. There is a period of prosperity when the banana company builds a new town opposite the old, but that ends with four-and-a-half years of ceaseless rain, which is followed by a drought. Then the winds come and blow Macondo away into the swirl of history.


Let us return to Remedios the Beauty, the one who was carried off to Heaven. That is not a euphemism - she really is carried off by supernatural powers. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of the masterpieces of magic realism. Other miracles happen. The gypsies and the carnivals bring real magic to town. The gypsy leader Melquiades dies in the time of the first Jose Arcadio Buendia but keeps visiting the house until the sixth Aureliano finally manages to decipher the sanskrit manuscript Melquiades left behind - the prophecy which foretells the fate of Macondo once its hundred years are up.


Magnificent - indisputably a work of genius. Already I want to read it again.

Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I first read this novella when it came out in paperback in 1995.  I liked it then but, re-reading it now and having read much more Latin American literature, I loved it.

The structure is clever.  The prologue, which may or may not be true, tells us that as a young reporter Marquez was sent to report on the exhumation of corpses from the old Clarrisan convent in Cartagena.  While he is there, a tomb in the third niche of the high altar is cracked open and an ocean of red-gold hair spills out.  A skull follows, the skull of a teenage girl.  The inscription tells us that this was once Sierva Maria de Todos Los Angeles.  The remainder of the book is her story.

Back in the late Eighteenth Century Sierva was the only child of an elderly decayed marquis and his crazy bulimic wife.  Sierva has been left to run wild with the slaves.  One day, when she is twelve years old, she is nipped on the ankle by a rabid dog.  Nothing happens but the marquis becomes obsessed with the idea that his daughter is going to go mad and die.  Eventually, after his wife has left him, he places Sierva in the convent where the abbess immediately concludes she is possessed.  The bishop sends his protege Cayetano Delaura to exorcise her.  Instead, he falls in love with the child.

The atmosphere of sweltering decay - the exploration of an alien, debased society imposed on layers and layers of native culture - is spellbinding.  There is a sense of a fairytale, or moral fable, yet it remains of novel of character tested in extremis.  Utterly compelling.