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Apr 02, 2021CallumCW rated this title 2 out of 5 stars
My perspective on this book is going to be different from many others, but perhaps that is why there is value in sharing it. As someone who identifies as Asexual (and possibly Aromantic), I am certainly not the intended audience for this book. I cannot imagine being so consumed by desire for a person as to render myself physically ill. I cannot imagine loving one singular person so much as to wait to be with that person for over fifty years. But hey, credit where it is due, Love in the Time of Cholera was the closest anyone or anything has come or likely will come to put me in that headspace. Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez has such a palpable love for love that it is infectious... even, if my experience is any indication, for people who normally don't experience such things. I have often shared memes on social media involving absurd, overdramatic examples of romance and couples, jestingly under the caption "Are straight people okay?" Love in the time of Cholera might as well come with the subtitle "Are straight people okay?: The Novel." The structure of this book is unusual, to say the least. The plot is one part bodice ripping romance novel, one part breezy history of modern Columbia, and three parts meandering slice of life story. And while the plot drags in places (okay, in every place) the prose is beautiful enough to usually keep you engaged. Gabriel Garcia Marquez (and to an unclear extent, translator Edith Grossman) can turn a phrase so beautifully that it almost doesn't matter if the actual story seems to be going nowhere. You just feel yourself wanted to go along for the ride. Well... you want to go for the ride up to a point. Then you encounter the point of the novel where our primary protagonist, eternally pining lover-boy Florentino Ariza, grooms a teenage girl to be his lover despite being, at this point in the novel, well into his sixties. YIKES!!! And lest you think that this is some brilliant twist, spending two-hundred pages just to lure our guards down before hitting us with the revelation that this guy is a monster, the book seems to treat this behavior as if it is... charming? I guess that answers my own rhetorical question. The straight people are most definitely not alright!