Key themes
- Love as obsession and as its own form of waiting
- Old age, the body and what survives
- The difference between romantic love and the love that endures
About this book
A man waits fifty years for the woman he loves; a grand, unfashionable hymn to romantic persistence.
Published in 1985, Love in the Time of Cholera is often described as García Márquez's most personal novel. It won him the Nobel Prize's most prominent post-1967 platform, though he had already won the prize in 1982.
Discussion questions
- Florentino Ariza waits 51 years for Fermina Daza. Is this devotion, obsession, self-delusion or something the novel presents as genuinely romantic — and how do you read the final pages?
- While waiting, Florentino has hundreds of affairs. Does this behaviour undercut his claim to undying love — or does the novel present it as consistent with his particular psychology?
- The novel takes place against the backdrop of cholera and old age. What does this setting say about the relationship between love and death — and between the body's decline and the persistence of desire?
- García Márquez draws on his own parents' courtship for the novel's central relationship. How does knowing this biographical parallel change your reading — and does the novel romanticise or interrogate that real relationship?
- One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera are very different novels. How does this later work refine or revise the magical realist mode — and which do you find more emotionally direct?
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