Sunday, April 26, 2015

Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

'Love in the Time of Cholera' was recommended to me by a friend. I usually disregard books that blatantly seem like love stories. I am simply not a big fan. However, her last recommendation was Pamuk's 'My Name is Red', one that I thoroughly enjoyed. So despite the name, I decided to give this one a shot as well.

I could not have been wronger about the book. It was absolutely not a love story. It was rather a romantic story, and disgustingly misogynist. Fortunately I had read a pedantic work by A.L. Basham between this and Khushwant Singh's 'Company of Women', else it would have been an overdose of sexual fantasies of old men. Gabo's version was much more polished though. But his virile fantasies were staring back at me through the pages. His story is full of "selfless women" who were willing to please Florentino Ariza at any hour of the day. Women whose door our dear protagonist knocks and is received with great love. A womanizer who can make prostitutes fall in love with him, get married women killed for infidelity and stir passion in the hearts of widows. All this he does without the help of good looks. Gabo had created an amalgamation of every man's fantasies! On the other hand was Fermina Daza who time and again kept contradicting her own character. Gabo ties these two in a timeless love (?) and a Dr. Juvenal Urbino is thrown in to make things more interesting.

The story is about how Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza. His pathetic self moves Daza to accept his proposal and they fall in a feverish young love. Daza's father tries to intimidate Florentino, failing which he takes away Fermina for a long vacation to her home land, in the hope that she would forget Florentino, but they manage to keep in touch and remain in love. However, when Fermina returns, she is another, more mature, woman and on the first meeting with Florentino, she refutes him and their engagement. Dr. Urbino is a local hero and the saviour of the city from the grips of cholera. He sees Fermina and falls in love with her "plebeian charms". Fermina keeps on turning down his various advances and one fine day she changes her mind and marries him. They have a stable marriage where they travel and have two children and are the center of the town's affairs. Florentino Ariza, on the other hand runs amok and keeps laying one girl after another in the hope that they would cure him of Fermina's love. But none do and he is still in love with her when Dr. Urbino dies of an accident fifty years after Daza had said no to Florentino. He woos Fermina again, makes her fall in love with him and their "young love finds a new life in the twilight of their lives".

For multiple reasons I did not like the story. The characters were inconsistent, the plot was too unrealistic at times. However, the only ting that made it bearable was Gabriel Garcia Marquez's writing. His style was rather simple but the way he connected his stories was very seamless. There were fillers that did not seem so and in no part was I actually bored, despite not liking the story too much. People tell me that his 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is better. But I don't think I am picking up another Gabo unless I have nothing else on my plate.