The ending of this book took my breath away. I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude, but Love in the Time of Cholera is just as good, if not better. I don't know whether I should be crying or smiling! This is a book about love; it's about a woman, Fermina, who marries a good man, falls in love, and lives a relatively happy life. It's about a man, Florentino, who waits all his life suffering in unrequited love to try and win back the sweetheart of his youth.
Unlike in One Hundred Years of Solitude, politics are far in the background. State violence and politics are there, but they aren't nearly as pronounced as they are in One Hundred Years of Solitude. This book is shorter and it deals with far fewer characters, but it's just as rich.
One of my favourite scenes in this book--if you read it you'll understand why I found it so comical--is Fermina's wedding night. Fermina's new husband, expects her to be shy, and she is at first, but then she begins to examine his anatomy for the first time. After observing her husband's penis "with an interest that was beginning to seem more than scientific" she comments on "how ugly it is," and how she thinks "it has too many things on it." Her husband agrees! When I was reading I laughed out loud because it's not he kind of love-making scene I expected when I first began to read it.
I'm not sure whether I found Florentino, the man who waited all his life for another chance with Fermina, entirely tragic and romantic, or pathetic. As romantic as it sounds for a man to wait fifty-one years for a second chance with a teenage sweetheart, at many points in the novel I just wanted him to let go and get on with his life.
I won't spoil the ending here. I will say, however, that this is one of the most beautiful novels about love that I've read in a long time.
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