So much to enjoy in Love in the Time of Cholera, but one warning

 So much to like in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's great novel Love in the Time of Cholera (1985, tr. 1988) - and, for those overwhelmed by Covid-19 panic, the novel has little or nothing to do w/ the cholera epidemic so don't let that put you off - right on through to the final section in which at last Florentino's 50+-year obsession has finally given him the chance to woo and win the now-widowed (as we saw in the first chapter) Fermina. GGM does a terrific job, maybe the best ever, in depicting the sexual relationship in an elderly couple - the courtship w/ its shame and embarrassment, its physical difficulties, its satisfaction in quiet, intimate moments of peace. The final section encompasses a voyage up the Magdalena River, during which Florentino wins her love after years of indifference and even hostility - and the voyage recapitulates a similar journey that Florentino took in his youth, to get away from his heartsick troubles - and in this journey he sees, and we see, how the landscape of this Caribbean country (Colombia, obvious) has been ruined by logging - unexpectedly, this novel has become a dystopian novel of ecological disaster, way ahead of its time. If you, like me, mark in your reading material passages of exceptional beauty, insight, and detail, you'll end up w/ markings on every page - and I can't say that about any other 20th-century writer other than Proust. I do, however, have to reiterate my only quibble with the otherwise great novel about love and the pursuit of happiness, and that's Florentino's sexual relationship w/ the teenage girl (named America, for whatever that's worth) whose family had entrusted her to him to protect her as her guardian when she was a student near his home; there's no excusing his horrible and criminal behavior to this girl (not a woman, thank you) she 50 years his junior - and in fact in the final chapter Florentino learns that, in his absence on the river voyage, America killed herself - and that ends that, w/ hardly a moment of remorse and none of guilt. Sure, a lot of fiction in the 20th century was way off base regarding the treatment of women, but aside from Lolita no other significant novel that I can think of included and seemingly condoned such criminal behavior. Sorry to end on that note, as there's so much else to enjoy in this novel; caveat emptor.