Love in the Time of Cholera

In a half-century long love story, we’re introduced to Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, who fell passionately in love in their youth over their letters - but as both matured, Fermina decides to marry a wealthy doctor and they part ways. Yet Florentino is a hopeless romantic and for his whole life, he saves a spot for Fermina in his heart even as he spends much of his time in sexual affairs with countless other women. In Florentino, Márquez presents an unfiltered, if a little unconventional, idea of love that’s at once touching yet not so lofty as to be unrealistic. And in Fermina, who lives happily in her marriage, he shows that some stories cut short by the whims of fate never quite have a resolute and unchangeable end until the finality of death.

Florentino and Fermina’s grand love story during their youth struck me as unconventional because it happened over stolen glances and secret letters. There was no passionate flourish, not in real life that is - all the flourish were inside each other’s minds. In Pyramus-and-Thisbe fashion, the struggles of being together added to their passion, and their love is so strange yet so powerfully poetic because they couldn’t have each other. This was the reason that Fermina broke things off with Florentino when she realized she didn’t actually know the person Florentino is, but rather only knew her idea of him. Altogether the story is a rich elaboration of a line Tolstoy wrote: “if there are as many minds as there are heads, then there are as many kinds of love as there are hearts”.