Love in the Time of Cholera

As the title suggests, the novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Garcia Marquez deals with practical and nostalgic love. The author has the ability of portraying excellent determination in his eagerness to develop his stylistic range. Supporting almost a mythical quality grounded with an air of daily gossip, the novel includes descriptions of love which drift between unearthly beauty and terror. Love in the Time of Cholera is a mixture of two contrasting factors: the purity of love, and the way love is personified in everyday life. Love in the Time of Cholera is seen almost as an anatomy of love. The novel's most original descriptions, both in an anatomical and a creative sense, could be compared to the development from seed to flower in the progression of love out of disrespectful neighborhoods of "convenience.'' Most of the meaningless attacks of day to day life, shared by two people who have bonded with each other - all the repulsive smells, undignified tasks and boring routines; all the unspoken bitterness; all the gloomy emphasis on unlived possibilities - are unmercifully described. Love's strength to grow in such dark circumstances, to rise above life's evil forces and still remain slightly unharmed, and to even stay sacred, is perhaps the most expertly portrayed theme in the novel. Just as the superior power of spiritual love may overcome the seriousness of level-headedness, so too it may overwhelm passionate strength, transforming Florentino's nostalgia of love into the reality of love as it must be lived in the present. Ironically, while Dr. Urbino's studies in France include his protection under "the most outstanding epidemiologist of his time … professor Adrien Proust, father of the famous novelist,'' Florentino is fated to live in the haze of a "Proustian nightmare", evoking almost an overfed nostalgia for Fermina. While his time is spent with 622 different lovers, at the end of it all he still considers himself a virgin, untouched by