The challenge and the beauty of Love in the Time of Cholera

 When I reviewed Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera back in the 1980s I remarked that it would be one of the few novels of its time that were to be read and re-read in future generations - and that's certainly the case. GGM's reputation and popularity remain extraordinarily high even 40 or so years later - and Love ... Cholera (despite its use as a plot prop in a crappy romcom film in the 90s) stands alongside Hundred Years of Solitude as his twin peaks of excellence. Love/Cholera is far less historical/political that Solitude; it's more of a love story than the turbulent history of a time and place - imagined, but clearly built on GGM's native Colombia. Both novels are built upon a superabundance of absorbed details; probably no other writer of literary fiction had such a cinematic style as GGM; he fully realizes every moment, every scene, every character down to the last and finest detail - all while keeping the plot rushing along (no Proustian languers; rather, a richness of observation that verges at times on the comic). I'm about 1/4 of the way into the novel, which GGM composed in a series of long (50 pp or so) unnumbered sections - all of which are takes on undying love and on sudden decisions or actions that alter the course of one's entire life. There's high drama throughout, vivid characterization, some vastly and often dark comic scenes (the death of a character trying to retrieve a foul-mouthed parrot from its perch in a tree) and of course the re-creation of a time and place, early 20th century in a small city on the Caribbean coast of South America (Colombia, obviously). It can be a demanding novel - sometimes hard to remember characters' names, which in GGM's world are sometimes infuriatingly similar to one another, but worth staying with for the long run, as the novel is absorbing and in a style unique to this one great writer.