I'll spoil this book for you if we're not careful!
Aging and "death, that S.O.B." were heavily felt in a book about love that lasts (maybe waits?) a lifetime...supposedly. If Mr.Marquez had left the love out of it I might have been satisfied.
Florentino Arizo is a young Colombian who is a hopeless, obsessive romantic fixated on acquiring the love of one person for the duration of his entire life. Whilst he
"waits" he experiences 622 affairs hoping for his object of fixation's husband to die. "Unfaithful but not disloyal!" is how he rationalizes his acts of infidelity to her.
Aside from being so sexual and obsessed, his fear of aging and chronic lifelong constipation are the most notable traits of this incredibly depraved character that in no way could I feel sympathy for no matter how well written his plight of aging may be. His life's experiences lead to extensive meditations and written letters on aging gracefully and acceptance of what has been, for him, a lifelong losing battle and turn to acceptance of the conclusion. To cope with being an anxious, selfish person he uses sexuality as a comfort and names it "loving". He makes very little, if any, sacrifice in his life for the benefit of others but views his attempts to stave off old age as being for the sake of his intended love. He is unctuous with lotions and slimy with deceipt to everyone. He is aptly described as a shadow of a person which is a perfect description of a man lacking substance; he simply had no moral character and no one knows him and of what he is capable.
AS he slept his way through 622 affairs with married women, women he raped and fathered children with but then didn't care for, he recorded them in volumes of books. He reflects that he cared for some of them and felt some close ties to some but what is most disgusting and appalling to me is how the tone of the writing makes his actions seem perfectly understandable, even acceptable by not making the vices noteworthy. There was simply no moral repudiation to his actions in the story! Ahhh! The descriptions of his "making love" disgusted me. And I don't mean the actions, I mean the perceptions and attitudes of what is love. Is it love to sleep with married women? He was openly preying on women he knew would want him and wanted sex, particularly widows and even the young, poor and vulnerable.
When the movie was made THIS is the man they chose to play the part of Florentino Ariza...
But I was picturing him looking like this one....
I hung on until the end needing to know how it all worked out for this very unique individual.
His great love interest was Fermina Daza who rejected him after years of writing love letters. She had the opportunity to become only slightly liberated during her teen years of secret love letter writing. Then she finally came face to face with him (Florentino Ariza) and in one moment cast him off and married someone else not understanding her motives and going on to lead a most interesting and often troubled married life, also not realizing that Florentino was going to trail her forever. She was a lost person with a lost identity, apathetic and yet fiery. She was filled with rage and emptiness. She was a walking dichotomy. She experienced freedoms and yet was never truly free in her life. She ghosted through much of her life unable to put her finger on what would make her truly happy. She lived to serve and manage and make appearances but she desperately needed an awakening! One of the most interesting things about her was that she had a hoarding disorder. I think that towards the end as her material things began to be put to the fire she experiences self-discovery through the lightening of burdens she carried through her entire life.
On a whole this book had a lot of potentially interesting ideas wrapped in a sentimental love story but the metaphor in the title was a little too much. Love = cholera. Love in this book is a real sickness that possibly only gets a little better as aging and death creeps up and rears its smelly old head.
I could have really enjoyed this book, but like I said in the description of Florentino Arizo, why read a book where the main character is so deplorable? What lesson did all of his creepiness serve? For me, it was too UUUcky. I can only rate this book at THREE out of ten. I agreed with critic Michael Wood in the New York Review of Books who wrote that
"love is a disease in this book, and this is a romantic novel; but the disease is one of the self-deluding, stubborn will, a fruit of mythology and obstinacy rather than any fate beyond ourselves." He goes on to say that the novel, "like García Márquez's other novels, is an exploration of destiny but of this kind of destiny: the kind we invent and displace and fear and desperately live up to or die for."
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