Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

I read this. And this has been one of the good reads after the recent serious books.

By that I don't mean that this is not serious. It is pretty serious if you look at it. The whole plot can be summarily written in 5 sentences but then it's not always about the story. It has more to do with how it was told and that's where a classic differs from a contemporary book.

The book is about love, and perseverance. Young lovers who got separated at very young age but were united after 50 years. This is the time when someone might not be thinking about the lost love, forget about finding that lost lover. However, Florentino never lost his love. He was always waiting for it.

This has a lot of sex, infidelity, stupidity, and travel. Which summarily describes any normal life. The only thing which is not normal is how long love can last. A common thought among the readers about this is that this book is full of sex. Somehow, people are not able to accept the fact that the protagonist was having a lot of sex while he waited for all those fifty years. This can be due to the fact that a lot of people don't see the two things (love and sex) separately. It is a common belief that one precedes another. This can be attributed to how the idea of love and sex has been taught and understood by the larger society. What it will look like if we remove all the pieces of his going to other women. Imagine, Florentino might have chosen to be a priest which might have made a lot of people happy, and I don't think it's impossible that there might be a novel version of it where he devoted all his life to charity, and died of cholera. And all those readers who objected to the real version might actually cheer it up!

A second doubt is about the reality of love as defined here. This is very much obvious that for all practical matters the kind of love shown here is not something which we encounter everyday (or maybe in a lifetime). But a lot of time the idea of love is lost on Florentino. People ignore the love of Fermina and her husband which endured the most difficult obstacles of a real life love. The mesmerising story of longing overshadowed the real story of a married couple.

If you're a fan of GGM's other works, you may be disappointed because it doesn't have the magical realism of "hundred years of solitude" but a reader should be glad that it doesn't have it.

This is a bit long one but worth a read.