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Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I remember Sarah Anderson's comic about reading a book so good that leaves you brooding for quite sometime. This book has given me that feeling. After hearing so much about GGM, I finally decided to pick up this beautiful edition. I have developed the habit of taking notes while reading which helps a lot while reviewing the book, which in this case I took way too many (says volumes about the book).
This is a story of Florentino Ariza, Fermina Daza and Dr. Juvenal Urbino with many other significant and memorable characters. It spans around more than fifty years with lot of love and heartbreaks. What I loved about this book is the depiction of people with heartbreaking sense of reality; with warts and all. After reading Jane Austen, this book is the polar opposite experience. GGM doesn't pull his punches, which by the way, hit in you in guts many times (lot of gory and revolting narratives). He has a cruel sense of humour which makes you feel guilty while laughing.
In this book, there is infidelity in surprisingly large amount or maybe it's always there but we don't see it; but it doesn't mean love isn't there. Maybe the most illustriously written part of this book is the depiction of ageing process in all its micro details which sometimes make you depressed, thinking about imminent future. One quirky thing written here is about smoking cigarettes with lit end inside the mouth, which I found one of those fun tricks/facts you take away from a novel.
There is no dearth of fantastic mono/dialogs in it like "It is life, more than death, that has no limits" and "My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse". I couldn't list them all or it would become a short story sized review. I want to sum up the review by adapting from one of the lines in this book - 'It is a meditation on life, love, old age and death.'
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