One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude
García Márquez's most famous novel, set in the same Caribbean world but much stranger. Read it after this one.
Read our takeLove in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez's 1985 novel about a telegraph clerk who loses the girl he loves to a doctor, and waits more than half a century to tell her again.
- 1985
About Gabriel García Márquez
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeLove in the Time of Cholera was first published in Bogotá by Oveja Negra in 1985.[1] As young people, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall in love. Fermina marries a wealthy, well-born doctor instead, and Florentino waits.[2] The story runs from about 1880 to 1930 in a Caribbean port city that is never named.[3] Edith Grossman's English translation came out from Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1988.[4]
The story, in more detail
The novel opens on a Pentecost Sunday with a death. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the city's oldest and most famous physician, is called to the house of his chess partner, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. Saint-Amour, a photographer of children, has killed himself with the fumes of gold cyanide.[5]
Dr. Urbino is past eighty. He still teaches clinical medicine every morning and wears a white linen suit with a gold watch chain. He also takes some medicine in secret every hour, even though he has always opposed prescribing such comforts for old age.[5]
Paris runs all through the doctor's life. Books from his bookseller in Paris arrive by mail, and he follows French literature more closely than Spanish. His manner, the narrator says, is the same as when he came home from Paris soon after the great cholera epidemic.[5] He had studied there as a young man.[6]
The first chapter follows Dr. Urbino through the rest of that Sunday. Then the novel jumps back fifty years, to a young telegraph clerk and the girl who would become the doctor's wife.[3] The middle of the book follows three lives across half a century, from the late 1800s into the next century.[3]
The full plot
Florentino Ariza is an apprentice telegraph clerk. He delivers a message to the house of Lorenzo Daza and falls in love with Daza's daughter, Fermina, whom he sees in the sewing room. He sits in the park across from her house every day, reading poetry and hoping to see her.[6]
They write to each other in secret for two years and agree to marry. When her father finds out, he takes Fermina away on a long trip to relatives in Valledupar. With her cousin Hildebranda Sanchez's help she keeps writing to Florentino by telegraph.[6] When she comes home, she suddenly breaks it off.[6]
Dr. Juvenal Urbino, just back from his studies in Paris, is fighting cholera in the city. He is called to examine Fermina for a suspected case. She is perfectly healthy, but he keeps coming back. Fermina resists at first, and Hildebranda talks her into marrying him.[6]
Florentino is devastated. He takes a boat trip down the Magdalena River and comes back to a long life of secret love affairs. He keeps notebooks on them, and the count reaches 622.[2][7] He also goes to work for his uncle, Don Leo Loayza XII, at the River Company of the Caribbean, and rises steadily.[6]
The Urbino marriage has its troubles. Fermina finds out that her husband has been sleeping with Barbara Lynch, the wife of a Presbyterian minister. She leaves him and lives with her cousin Hildebranda for two years, until he comes to fetch her.[6]
Florentino eventually runs the River Company himself. In old age he takes charge of América Vicuña, a fourteen-year-old ward, and begins an affair with her.[6] Then, one Pentecost Sunday around 1930, Dr. Urbino falls from a mango tree while trying to catch his parrot, and dies.[3]
How it ends — spoilers ahead
After the funeral, Florentino stays behind and tells Fermina he has waited more than half a century to repeat his vow of eternal love. She is furious and orders him out of the house. He starts writing to her again, in a new style, and slowly she lets him back into her life.
Florentino drops América Vicuña. The girl kills herself, and Florentino grieves her in private.
Florentino arranges a river voyage for Fermina and himself on a steamboat. On the journey she realizes she loves him. The novel ends with the two of them, seventy-six and seventy-two, going up and down the Magdalena River on a boat flying the yellow flag of cholera.
Themes and analysis
Two meanings of cólera
The Spanish title carries a double meaning that English loses. Thomas Pynchon pointed it out in his 1988 review. El cólera is the disease, which sweeps through the city in terrible waves. La cólera is anger, which taken to its extreme becomes war.
Both kinds of death hang over the book. Civil wars keep flaring in the background, and people killed by one are sometimes mistaken for victims of the other. Dr. Urbino spends his career fighting the epidemic with public health measures. Florentino's lovesickness gives him symptoms so like cholera that his mother, Tránsito Ariza, has to nurse him through it.
A doctor from Paris, a clerk from the port
Dr. Urbino's tastes run to France. He studied in Paris and came home soon after the great cholera epidemic. At eighty-one he still wears what the narrator calls a Pasteur beard, after the French scientist Louis Pasteur. His new books come by mail from a bookseller in Paris.
Florentino Ariza's life turns on the river. His uncle tells him that without river navigation there is no love, and his two great river voyages are half a century apart.
The publisher's reading guide asks what the conflict between the two men shows about European customs and Caribbean life. Fermina chooses the doctor first. Half a century later she chooses the clerk.
The river the steamboats used up
Florentino grows rich from the River Company, and the novel shows what that costs. The company's steamboats burn wood, and by the end they have stripped the great forests along the Magdalena River. Florentino only notices when it is far too late.
Pynchon read the book as a novel about age and death as much as love. He called the final river chapter unlike anything he had read.
América Vicuña
Not every reader cheers Florentino on. The novelist J. M. Coetzee, reviewing a later García Márquez book in 2006, singled out his affair with América Vicuña, the fourteen-year-old in his care. He argued that the novel, a comedy at heart, is not large enough to hold her story.
The publisher's own reading guide asks readers to compare her suicide at the end with Jeremiah de Saint-Amour's at the start. The two deaths frame the whole book.
Quotes from Love in the Time of Cholera
It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.
Damn fool. The worst was over.
And when you do find one, observe with care, they almost always have crystals in their heart.
without river navigation there is no love
Why we recommend it
A love story about old age
The two lovers are seventy-six and seventy-two when the story finally brings them together.
The first chapter
Chapter one covers a single Sunday in the life of an eighty-one-year-old doctor, from a friend's suicide at dawn to his own fall from a mango tree.
Florentino Ariza
A shy telegraph clerk who writes other people's love letters and keeps notebooks of 622 affairs, while waiting half a century for one woman.
A famous review
Thomas Pynchon reviewed the book on the front page of The New York Times Book Review in 1988 and called it a shining and heartbreaking novel.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Florentino Ariza
A telegraph clerk who becomes a shipping executive. He loves Fermina Daza all his life and waits more than half a century for her.
Fermina Daza
A strong-willed girl who writes to Florentino in secret, then breaks it off and marries the city's most eligible doctor.
Dr. Juvenal Urbino
Fermina's husband, a Paris-trained physician who leads the fight against cholera and dies at eighty-one chasing his parrot.
Also in the book
Jeremiah de Saint-Amour
A refugee from the Antilles, photographer of children and Dr. Urbino's chess partner. His suicide opens the novel.
Hildebranda Sanchez
Fermina's cousin in Valledupar, who first helps her write to Florentino and later persuades her to marry Dr. Urbino.
Tránsito Ariza
Florentino's mother, who nurses him through a lovesickness that looks like cholera.
Don Leo Loayza XII
Florentino's uncle, head of the River Company of the Caribbean, who gives him work and a lesson about love and rivers.
Lorenzo Daza
Fermina's father, who takes her away on a long trip to make her forget Florentino.
Bring it to book club
- Why does García Márquez describe love and cholera in such similar terms?
- Florentino counts 622 affairs yet says he saved himself for Fermina. Do you believe him?
- Why does Fermina choose Dr. Urbino, and why does she choose Florentino fifty years later?
- Florentino's uncle says that without river navigation there is no love. What does he mean?
- The book opens with one suicide and nearly ends with another. How do the two deaths change the love story?
Timeline
1985
Oveja Negra publishes El amor en los tiempos del cólera in Bogotá.
1987
Grasset publishes Annie Morvan's French translation in Paris.
1988
Alfred A. Knopf publishes Edith Grossman's English translation in New York.
1988
Thomas Pynchon reviews the novel on the front page of The New York Times Book Review on 10 April.
1997
Everyman's Library issues a hardcover with an introduction by Nicholas Shakespeare.
2007
Vintage publishes the current paperback, ISBN 9780307389732, on 5 October.
Book editions
- Hardcover
- Alfred A. Knopf
- 1988
- 9780394561615
- Edith Grossman
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Everyman's Library
- 1997
- Edith Grossman
- Paperback
- Vintage International
- 2007
- 9780307389732
- Edith Grossman
Reader reviews
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
His last novel. J. M. Coetzee read it as a second try at the story of Florentino Ariza and América Vicuña.
Read our take
The Plague
Albert Camus's 1947 novel of a city closed by an epidemic. A doctor fights the disease in both books.
Read our takeLove in the Time of Cholera: frequently asked questions
What is Love in the Time of Cholera about?
Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall in love when they are young, but she marries a doctor, Juvenal Urbino. Florentino has hundreds of affairs and waits. When the doctor dies more than fifty years later, Florentino tells Fermina again that he loves her.
Where is Love in the Time of Cholera set?
In an unnamed port city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, between about 1880 and 1930. Thomas Pynchon described the city as a mix of Cartagena and Barranquilla. Much of the story also happens on the Magdalena River.
How long does Florentino wait for Fermina?
Fifty-one years, nine months and four days, according to the publisher's reading guide and Thomas Pynchon's review. The publisher's own product description gives fifty years, nine months and four days.
Who translated Love in the Time of Cholera into English?
Edith Grossman. Alfred A. Knopf published her translation in New York in 1988, three years after the Spanish original. Pynchon praised it in The New York Times as faithful and beautiful.
What does the title mean?
In Spanish, cólera means both cholera, the disease, and anger. Thomas Pynchon pointed out the double meaning in his 1988 review. The novel is full of both epidemics and civil wars.
Does Love in the Time of Cholera have a Paris connection?
Yes, through Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who studied in Paris and came home just after a great cholera epidemic. He still orders his books from a bookseller in Paris. The French translation was published in Paris by Grasset in 1987.
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Love in the Time of Cholera, its publication, and its place in literary history.
1↑Gabriel García Márquez: Bibliography
Official recordNobel Prize OutreachUsed forThe Nobel Prize bibliography: Bogotá, Oveja Negra, 1985; Grossman's translation, Knopf, 1988.
4↑Love in the Time of Cholera: Library of Congress catalog record for the Alfred A. Knopf first English edition (LCCN 87040484)
ArchiveLibrary of Congress, 1988Used forLibrary of Congress catalog record for the Knopf first English edition.
7↑Sleeping Beauty
PeriodicalThe New York Review of Books, 23 February 2006, 2006Used forJ. M. Coetzee in The New York Review of Books, 2006, on the novel's ending and on América Vicuña.
8Love in the Time of Cholera: Reader's Guide
WebsitePenguin Random HouseUsed forThe publisher's reading guide: introduction and discussion questions with page references.
9L'Amour aux temps du choléra, translated by Annie Morvan (Grasset, Paris, 1987): Bibliothèque nationale de France catalog record
ArchiveBibliothèque nationale de France, 1987Used forFrench national library catalog record for the first French edition, Paris, 1987.
10Gabriel García Márquez Papers: A Finding Aid
ArchiveHarry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at AustinUsed forHarry Ransom Center finding aid: two drafts of the novel and a copy of the 1985 Oveja Negra first edition.
11Gabriel García Márquez: Open Library author and edition records, used to confirm that every ISBN listed resolves to the book named
ArchiveOpen LibraryUsed forOpen Library edition records, used to confirm that each ISBN listed resolves to this novel.
12Love in the Time of Cholera
NovelGabriel García Márquez, 1985Used forThe primary text represented by this page, used for descriptions of the work’s contents and for any quoted passages shown here.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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