“… too young to know the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good,” “If he had told the truth not … anybody in this whole town would have loved him as much as they did.” “The toilet must have been invented by someone who knew nothing about men.” Interspersed through the novel Marquez gives us some acute aperçus. Joseph Conrad (in his pre-novelist incarnation as Joseph T K Korzeniowski) gains a brief mention as being involved in some sort of arms deal.

Only by inference is the possibility of atrocities hinted at, for example, “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.”

Flashes of the history of the country, which has seen several civil wars which were really all one war, appear only in passing, which is, of course, how the well-to-do would have experienced them. In the background are other colourful characters but the lives of these people are well-to-do, we see little, if any, of more impoverished inhabitants. Marquez does nothing so crude as to devote sections to one character, he weaves in and out of the three’s concerns without a break. The narrative flows between the three main agonists, detailing aspects of their lives in the decades over which the story rummages back and forward. The action of Love in the Time of Cholera mainly takes place in an unnamed city somewhere on the delta of the River Magdalena on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, though there is a late voyage up and down the river. In some respects this aspect of the novel has echoes in Orhan Pamuk’s similarly obsessed protagonist in The Museum of Innocence. The main focus of the novel is, however, on Florentino Ariza, who conceived a passion for Dr Urbino’s wife, Fermana Daza, in both their youths, and has maintained it ever since.

Sex does come later but not till well into the book.īy this gambit we are invited to believe that the story is to be that of Dr Juliano Urbino de la Calle, who has been called in to certify the death (by suicide) of his friend and chess opponent Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. (Bitter almonds is the smell of cyanide.) The only one remaining is sex. The opening sentence, “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love,” hits us immediately with two of the great triumvirate of literary preoccupations love and death.

Gabriel garcía márquez love