Love in the time of Cholera读后感

A Review of Love in the Time of Cholera

After One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera is the second book that I have read of Gabriel García Márquez. As one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, he writes with consistent style of tranquility and elegance with nothing to do with tender -ness or passion, though he has said modestly that the book was an old love story of happiness.

The story takes place between about 1880 and 1930, when cholera is flourishing in a Caribbean seaport city, unnamed but said to be a composite of Cartagena and Barranquilla, and it tells a love triangle among three major characters Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino from their youth to oldness and even death.

As García Márquez hi mself once said, “I think that a novel about love is as valid as any other.” So how can he make it? I think the essential one is the details ――every specific, slight and trifling detail shows in daily life. For instance, in the chapter 1, the arguments between the old couples Fermina, and Dr. Juvenal Urbino are mainly because of the little things such as the soap in the bathroom or the cleaning of toilet. And in the end of the book, when Florentino is together with old Fermina again, the way they express their love is to wash false teeth and do cupping for each other. It is those real and pure details that show the power and make the book of love become a book of life. We may gradually forget those details――they are concrete and appropriate but plain enough; they serve for the whole story. And the most perfect effect is that to make readers unaware of them.

When it comes to the creation intention, García Márquez has said he’d like to make the story happy one, instead of following the trend that love stories are always sorrowful. But in the book, we can still find the long waiting, endless missing, being refused over and over, and the embarrassing reunion when they’re old, which all bring out the sense of desperation and solitude. Therefore, I am more willing to regard the nice wish as García Márquez’s great compassion for the poverty, illness and turbulence that the lovers and people have suffered in that era.

And as for the love, the major theme of the book, it is throughout the story. Forms of love such as secret love, first love, one-side love, extramarital love, evening love, etc. all have been showed. Like life and death, love is so common in our daily life and it is close to everyone. We may have experienced it in real life, and read a lot in literary works as well, but it is still hard for us to give a definition to love. And some people especially girls, tend to fall into the fictitious world that the books have weaved. In their mind, there is always an ideal mate with clear image, but usually when the one appears, he or she is totally different from that. Moreover, the love itself is not going to be as outstanding as stories. After all, there are few people can hold the love for only one in their whole life like Florentino and regain the one they love in the

end.

At the end of the fiction, the ship of cholera seems not to reach the destination. Life may have kinds of possibilities; while there can be only one in the story. Thus, García Márquez makes the word “forever” of Florentino as an end, which gives us a feeling of haste. But after appreciating over, such an approach can well reveal that as the distillation of life, literature can never reach to the level of real life.