Think about the themes of aging, disease, and love which are all portrayed in the book: Do you agree with Urbino and Ofelia Daza that “old people have no business being in love – or making love?” What metaphors/places involve disease? What do you think of “divided love”?DISCUSSION QUESTIONS from BookRags:
1. What does Garcia Marquez achieve by making Florentino wait fifty-one years, nine months, and four days instead of a mere two or three years? How does this influence the reader's willingness to suspend disbelief?
2. How do most people regard the elderly when they demonstrate love and affection? Is love and romance generally considered to be the exclusive domain of the young?
3. Does the author seem to prefer one form of love more than the others? Which form has the most enduring qualities?
4. In what ways does the narrative in Love in the Time of Cholera resemble that of a television soap opera?
5. There is a notable absence of jealousy among the three protagonists of Love in the Time of Cholera. How does this absence support the theme of enduring love?
THOUGHTS ON THE WRITING STYLE
• There was a formality in the use of whole names (or “Dr. Urbano”) throughout the entire story for the main characters and their parents and children. Other characters, like Hildebranda, (from lower classes? servants?) were referred to by just their first names.
• The chapters were really long and dense. Parts we expected to be dragged out and descriptive were short, and other parts were quite extended in their length.
• We thought a little about the book Blindness and knew it had also been translated. It had language quirks, as well, and we wondered when this kind of long sentence/long chapter style was related to the author and when it was related to the translation.
SETTING (adapted from BookRags)
Love in the Time of Cholera takes place in a small coastal town in South America from the late nineteenth century to the early 1930s, a period in history marked by great technical innovation and changes in societal attitudes. Dental braces were invented in 1928, and didn’t change much until the 1970’s. This is an era during which the horse and buggy is replaced by the automobile and the hot air balloon initiates man's forays into the skies, inaugurating the first airmail delivery. Environmental changes result from extensive logging to provide fuel for the steamboats that travel up and down the Magdalena River, thus causing damage from erosion and the disappearance of wildlife. Plague and ecological devastation take their toll on the small town, making it a victim to the same ills suffered by the outside world. Furthermore, the community endures cholera epidemics and civil wars that decimate its population. War and pestilence seem to recur throughout the novel in an endless cycle of destruction and decay.
IN GENERAL
We really liked the book. It was interesting to follow their lives and to see the aging process and the many expressions of love. We wondered what the author was trying to say about love. What kind is the “best”?
But first we “let go” of the things which bothered us, including the writing style (see above). Florentino’s womanizing was with lonely, loose, widowed, older, etc. women and this was acceptable in our willing suspension of disbelief. We had much more of a problem with his falling for his “charge” América. He deliberately used his power as her “protector” to seduce her when she was so young and this pedophilic part of him made us cringe. We also talked about how the women in the story seemed to be in service to the men. They cooked, cleaned house, and cared for children, but they also cleaned the men when the men aged, supported them in business (but the men got the credit), and were controlled by fathers and husbands. Some things never change.
Because the women were depicted in such subservient roles, we admired Fermina so much more. She was educated, she traveled, and when she returned, she could see the difference between infatuation and true love. She also told off her daughter (telling her to never come back into her house) when the daughter said something about Fermina loving and old man and that’s is, well, gross.
THEME OF LOVE
• Though the doctor seemed very boring, and he and Fermina didn’t marry for love, by the end of the marriage they came to realize that what they had done together and for each other really was “love.”
• Florentino was infatuated with Fermina his entire life, over fifty years, not that it kept him from having a gazillion affairs. Florentino repeatedly vows fidelity and everlasting love. In the end, he is able to reflect on love in a way that shows Fermina he is no longer “lovestruck” and at this point, she actually pays attention. His letters analyzing love are just what she needs to understand and get over the death of her husband. We thought the author was trying to say that once you know yourself and have a life of experiences, THEN you can understand was “real” love is. So, basically, love comes to the aged.
• We also talked a bit about jealousy. There didn’t seem to be any. It seems easier to feel jealousy when you think you are missing something. And when you trust people, there isn’t a need to feel jealous.
• When Florentino asks Sara Noriega which is love, the turbulent bed or the peaceful Sunday afternoons, she answers that love is everything they do naked – "spiritual love from the waist up, and physical love from the waist down" – and together they write and submit a poem about this concept of divided love.
• This either/or mentality has fed Florentino's half-century obsession with Fermina; he sees women as either idealized, perfect "crowned goddesses," (his nickname for Fermina Daza) or as libidinous nymphs. This immature dichotomy persists throughout his lifetime of liaisons, which Márquez depicts with such burlesque caricature that we cannot miss the point that Florentino is indeed living out the revelation he had "at the height of pleasure" during his first sexual encounter with the mysterious stranger: "He could not believe...even refused to admit...that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion."
• It is not until he begins visiting her that he begins to see that beneath that idealized vision he has held all those years lies a real woman with all her features and faults. Only then can his "love" for her mature beyond that divided love. He no longer needs to replace his love (his fantasy attachment to Fermina Daza) with sex without love (his hundreds of sexual escapades).
• The symptoms of love mimic those of cholera, though cholera is purely a backdrop to this story, hardly being front and center.
