Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I chose Love in the Time of Cholera to read next due to the recent death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the interesting news stories about his life and works. I have to say, I was quite disappointed with this one. I think I found the style and characters hard to relate to, though this changed towards the end.

The novel tells the story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. They fall in love young and keep this alive from a distance through passionate letters, hardly having the opportunity to meet. Even when Fermina Daza’s father finds out and tries to separate them by taking his daughter to stay with their uncle, Florentino Ariza manages to track her down and remain in contact. This continues for years until Fermina Daza returns, sees Florentino Ariza at the market and dismisses their relationship and planned marriage entirely.

She marries Doctor Urbino, although their marriage is not happy. Meanwhile, Florentino Ariza has many affairs with various women, with whom he finds passion but not love. The widow meets with him “in the hope of finding something that resembled love, but without the problems of love”. When the doctor dies they reunite and go on a cruise together. In order to prevent a scandal when people Fermina Daza knows try to board the ship, Florentino Ariza sends orders to the captain to not let anyone aboard due to a case of Cholera. But once the cholera flag is raised, no port will accept their ship and they are condemned to sail on forever.

The relationship between love and cholera is explicit throughout. In fact, Florentino’s lovesickness is at one point mistaken for cholera itself leading the doctor to conclude that “the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera”. Hence love and suffering go hand in hand, with both physical and emotional impacts. There also seems to be a link between love and death; at the end, the final surrender to love is signalled by the yellow cholera flag. Their love also seems more real when they are old; at the beginning it is infatuation without substance, a “delirious spring”, but when they rekindle their relationship it seems to have more depth and tenderness. Florentino has written her a new letter; a reflection on life, “as lyrical as the others, as rhetorical as all of them”, but this one has “foundation in reality”. They find something at the end that seems to go “beyond love”, with the knowledge that “love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death”.

The shifts in time between past and present could be linked to the turn of the century setting, in which past, present and future are revaluated. At one point in the novel, during celebrations for the new century, Doctor Juvenal Urbino is asked his opinion and says that “the nineteenth century is passing for everyone except us” – this community is stagnant due to the epidemic, as love leads to the ship’s endless to and fro motion.

The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton

This American Classic tells the story of Newland Archer as he prepares to marry May Welland, who seems his ideal conventional partner. He reconsiders this as he becomes increasingly drawn to Countess Ellen Olenska, who is very different from her cousin May, living alone in New York, and disreputable given her separation from her husband.

Written after the First World War but set in the 1870s, looking back on a lost era, Wharton criticises rather than idealises the society about which she writes, “a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs”. Therefore, the title is ironic; the age is prejudiced and false – an age of hypocrisy rather than innocence.

It is, however, innocent too, to the point of naivety.  They cannot imagine the destruction and chaos that the war will later bring to their comfortable and fashionable lives. May and Archer are both innocent: May not to see through the falsity of the society that surrounds her and conditions her expectations, and Archer to believe that he could escape it with Ellen. Archer is aware of May’s innocence and does not want her to have the kind of innocence “that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience”, but not of his own.

Ultimately choosing duty and tradition over the risk of the unknown passion, Archer lives the conventional life and feels confined by it: “As he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else”. Time jumps forward twenty-six years, skipping over May and Newland Archer’s life together. By the end of novel, the world around him has changed – symbolised by the telephone – but Archer has not.

After the death of his wife, in Paris with his son, Archer has the chance to meet Ellen again with nothing standing in the way. But at the last moment, when his son goes up to her apartment, Newland can’t bring himself to follow. He feels, “It’s more real to me here than if I went up” and only gives his son the excuse that he is ‘old-fashioned’. Archer realises that too much time has passed; he will be happier reminiscing about their youth than taking a chance on a meeting that is likely to lead to disappointment. This way he can preserve her idealised form and perhaps still keep the hope alive. The ending leaves us with the turn of the century and much left unsaid as Newland returns to his hotel with only his memory for company.  Not my favourite read so far, though I did enjoy it, I found the ending the most moving and the most real part.