Love in the Time of Cholera

This great, poetic love story explores the fatal impact of materialism on our vulnerable hearts. It is a lengthy, beautifully written book, presented in a wonderful translation that engulfs the reader in a lush jungle of words.

This engrossing book with its well-structured plot is inhabited by fully formed, intriguing characters. One of the most intriguing parts of the book is the title. Why love in the time of Cholera? What does cholera have to do with love, or with the plot of the book? It would be wrong to seek too dogmatic an answer to this question in an obviously poetic, and anti-dogmatic novel.

Nevertheless, I believe this book is about materialism, about how our craving for money and position can become a cholera-like disease that destroys love. The rest of this review contains passages that some readers might consider spoilers. Very early in the book, we learn that the love between Florentino and Fermina does not flow smoothly because Fermina chooses wealth and security with Juvenal Urbino over the passion offered her by Florentino. In reaction to his loss, Florentino spends his life in pursuit of wealth and fleeting sexual encounters. None of this brings him happiness, and much of his life, both sexual and professional, ends up enmeshed in dubious moral quandaries, destruction and perversion.

I read the story as an indictment of materialism in all its forms. The land in which the book takes place is ultimately decimated by this materialism, the beautiful and romantic forests that provide the lush setting for this book are destroyed, and the characters who inhabit them are no less ravished by their slavish pursuit of wealth rather than true love. In the end, the landscape is in ruins, the characters husks of their former selves. Materialism and disease reign supreme, love is perverted and lost. Any great novel, and Love in the Time of Cholera is a very great novel, cannot be easily reduced to simple themes and dogmatic statements.

Thus what I have written here is an over simplification of a complex book that has many virtues. The book can serve, for instance, as a catalogue of the various types of love or as a meditation on the difference in temperament between logical, rule bound people and those who are governed by romance, by the heart.

There are many other themes that run through the book. For me, however, the primary theme here is the destructive power of materialism, and how the twentieth century became a grave yard for love that was sacrificed to the false god Mammon.