Reading Group Guide
Our Book Club Recommendation
Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez's fifth novel, first published almost two decades ago, is a stunning portrayal of enduring love that manages at once to balance wry human comedy with a careful focus on the most complex of human emotions. Book clubs who have never experienced the Nobel Prize winner's celebrated mastery of language and imagery will find Love in the Time of Cholera a perfect introduction. Those reading groups already familiar with the writer whose name is synonymous with "magic realism" will not be disappointed in this story of a man whose desire outmatches time itself.
Faithfulness is arguably the most important theme in García Márquez's novel. In a fictional South American city, at the end of the 19th century, young telegraph operator Florentino Ariza falls in love with the beautiful Fermina Daza. But after her father's intervention, Fermina marries a more conventional suitor, the suave Dr. Juvenal Urbino. The novel opens with Urbino's death, 50 years after his marriage to Fermina. García Márquez then flashes back and unfolds the story of those 50 years, and in particular Florentino's amazingly constant love for Fermina, throughout decades of separation and her apparently final rejection of his attentions. After her husband's death, Florentino returns, an old man, to confess his undying devotion and to at last win her as his own.
As romantically straightforward as the basic plot might seem, García Márquez weaves into his tale of long-suffering love a vibrant skein of comedy. Florentino, who becomes a successful businessman, may be spiritually faithful, but in terms of the body he is anything but. The lover of countless lonely women and widows, Florentino remains unattached but constantly in love. García Márquez shrewdly draws a picture of romance and sexuality that is poetically intense but at the same time playfully, almost humorously over the top. Reading groups will find in Florentino an irresistible character -- an unlikely hero whose "innocence" survives his many experiences - and will enjoy debating how seriously García Márquez means us to take his long-suffering love.
There are more serious themes here besides romance, however. Florentino, Fermina, and Urbino all live through a cholera epidemic in their native country, and the theme of illness and fever relates to more than lovesickness in this novel. In his glowing review of Love in the Time of Cholera, Thomas Pynchon pointed out that the "cholera" of the title evokes not only the deadly disease, but "la cólera" -- the destructive spirit of anger and wrath, which at its most extreme is exemplified in war. Book clubs will find that this spellbinding story of transcendent devotion and fragile happiness provides an opportunity not just to discuss one of Latin America's greatest writers but to think and talk about love, pain, and the possibility for heartbreak and ecstasy contained in even the quietest of lives. Bill Tipper
Reading Group Resources from the Publisher
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
"A rich, commodious novel whose narrative power is matched only by its generosity of vision." -- The New York Time
The introduction, discussion questions, suggested reading list, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez masterful novel of unrequited love.
ABOUT THIS BOOK
In the late 1800s, in a Caribbean port city, a young telegraph operator named Florentino Ariza falls deliriously in love with Fermina Daza, a beautiful student. She is so sheltered that they carry on their romance secretly, through letters and telegrams. When Fermina Daza's father finds out about her suitor, he sends her on a trip intended to make her forget the affair. Lorenza Daza has much higher ambitions for his daughter than the humble Florentino. Her grief at being torn away from her lover is profound, but when she returns she breaks off the relationship, calling everything that has happened between them an illusion.
Instead, she marries the elegant, cultured, and successful Dr. Juvenal Urbino. As his wife, she will think of herself as "the happiest woman in the world." Though devastated by her rejection, Florentino Ariza is not one to be deterred. He has declared his eternal love for Fermina, and determines to gain the fame and fortune he needs to win her back. When Fermina's husband at last dies, 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days later, Florentino Ariza approaches Fermina again at her husband's funeral. There have been hundreds of other affairs, but none of these women have captured his heart as Fermina did. "He is ugly and sad," says one of his lovers, "but he is all love."
In this magnificent story of a romance, García Márquez beautifully and unflinchingly explores the nature of love in all its guises, small and large, passionate and serene. Love can emerge like a disease in these characters, but it can also outlast bleak decades of war and cholera, and the effects of time itself.
FOR DISCUSSION
1. Why does García Márquez use similar terms to describe the effects of love and cholera?
2. Plagues figure prominently in many of García Márquez's novels. What literal and metaphoric functions does the cholera plague serve in this novel? What light does it shed on Latin American society of the nineteenth century? How does it change its characters' attitudes toward life? How are the symptoms of love equated in the novel with the symptoms of cholera?
3. What does the conflict between Dr. Juvenal Urbino and Florentino Ariza reveal about the customs of Europe and the ways of Caribbean life? How is Fermina Daza torn between the two?
4. Dr. Urbino reads only what is considered fine literature, while Fermina Daza immerses herself in contemporary romances or soap operas. What does this reveal about the author's attitude toward the distinction between "high" and "low" literature. Does his story line and style remind you more of a soap opera or a classical drama?
5. After rejecting Florentino's declaration of love following her husband's funeral, why is Fermina eventually won over by him?
6. Why does a change in Florentino's writing style make Fermina more receptive to him?
7. What does Florentino mean when he tells Fermina, before they make love for the first time, "I've remained a virgin for you" (p. 339)?
8. Why does Florentino tell each of his lovers that she is the only one he has had?
9. What does Florentino's uncle mean when he says, "without river navigation there is no love" (p. 168)?
10. Do Fermina and Dr. Urbino succeed at "inventing true love" (p. 159)?
11. Set against the backdrop of recurring civil wars and cholera epidemics, the novel explores death and decay, as well as love. How does Dr. Urbino's refusal to grow old gracefully affect the other two characters? What does it say about fulfillment and beauty in their society? Does the fear of aging or death change Florentino Ariza's feelings toward Fermina Daza?
12. Compare the suicide of Jeremiah de Saint-Amour at the beginning of the book with that of Florentino's former lover, América Vicuña at the end. How do their motives differ? Why does the author frame the book with these two events?
13. Why is Leona Cassiani "the true woman in [Florentino's] life although neither of them ever knew it and they never made love" (p. 182)?
14. When Tránsito Ariza tells Florentino he looks as if he were going to a funeral when he is going to visit Fermina, why does he respond by saying, "It's almost the same thing" (p. 65)?
(Used by permission of Penguin Books.)
SUGGESTED READING
Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace; Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Judith Freeman, Red Water; Julia Glass, Three Junes; Josephine Humphreys, Rich in Love; Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold; Ian McEwan, Atonement; Toni Morrison, Love; Ann Patchett, Bel Canto; Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy; Sarah Stone, The True Sources of the Nile; Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina; Ivan Turgenev, First Love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. He is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction, including One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love In the Time of Cholera, The Autumn of the Patriarch, The General In His Labyrinth, and News of a Kidnapping. He lives in Mexico City.