Love in the Time of Cholera

Giving this one a VERY generous rating of two stars.

There were parts of this book that I genuinely liked: the idea of love conquering all, staying in love your whole life, and looking at life and marriage in an — overall — realistic way. I liked the characters of Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino, for the most part.

However, I'm fairly convinced that the author just needed an outlet for his disturbing sexual fantasies. And thus, the parade of Florentino's conquests, in so much detail that I wanted to throw down the book and yell WE GET IT ALREADY, HE LIKED WOMEN AND DIDN'T MIND USING AND ABUSING THEM. Marquez played WAY too fast and loose with the words “love,” “making love,” etc. He never admits that there are several instances of flat-out rape in this book; he ties it all up into a pretty little package of women forever looking for the men who raped them because they were so in love with their attackers.

Bullshit. This book was so full of bullshit.

But I'm the sucker that kept reading, waiting for the ultimate conclusion that we're concerned with from page 1: does Florentino finally get to be with the “one that got away”? (Hint: I stopped caring after he tells the OUTRAGEOUS lie that he's still a virgin at age 76, after the back of the book says that he partook in SIX HUNDRED TWENTY TWO AFFAIRS.)

But the real reason this book doesn't deserve any of the stars that I've given it is because, almost 300 pages in, when you're already invested enough to just want to finish the damn thing, this was when Marquez wrote that Florentino was regularly seducing a thirteen-year-old, a girl whom he, BY THE WAY, had been entrusted to be her legal guardian.

By the end I was convinced that it wasn't so much a good love story as a creepy story of a stalker who just COULDN'T. LET. GO.

There was just so much wrong with this book that even the parts I liked couldn't make up for it.