Love in the Time of Cholera (Penguin Modern Classics) by Marquez, Gabriel Garcia (September 6, 2007) Paperback

Really enjoyed this well-written and very different book. Good story line and I will search out other books by this author. Book arrived in perfect condition and within a couple of days of ordering. Very pleased with this seller.

Just reading it now, so far, so good! Thank you 😊❤️

Good quality book.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Colombia in 1927. His family was not poor, but it was ever increasing with new babies (some born out of his parents, some out of his father's constant womanizing away from the family home) and the family struggled at periods – García Márquez wrote in his autobiography that his sisters used to sit at night in the street under a lamppost to study the school lessons, in order to save electricity.This left in García Márquez a permanent scorn to waste and luxury (there's a lot of this in this book, specially in the character of the husband and doctor, Juvenal Ubino, as rich as vain). He was at the same time distrustful and attracted by the rich. His books are full of references to the immense wealth of some characters.García Márquez did two things while he was a child: follow his grandfather everywhere and read voraciously. His favourite authors, traces of which can be found in his work, are the South Americans of the previous generation (mainly Darío, Rulfo, Gallegos), William Faulkner and the Spanish classics (Calderón, Quevedo, Cervantes and Galdós). He would never abandon those influences. García Márquez left the oppressive, perennially hot villages and went to the larger cities of Colombia, the beautiful Cartagena and Bogotá, the capital of the country, where he left the Law studies too in order work in a newspaper and follow a vocation that he'll pursuit all his life: journalism. While working in a local newspaper, he managed to publish his first three novels. The three are short works, and only “No One Writes to The Colonel”, based in his grandfather perennial waiting for the war retirement pension, is of interest.García Márquez spent the best part of the first half of the sixties composing his next work, which would become his most famous and one of the best novels of the Century. Those were years of agonic and long writing that left the family (García Márquez was then married and with two sons) completely broke. When the novel was finished in 1967 Mercedes, his wife, had to sell some pieces of jewelry in order to pay the postage of the manuscript to the publisher.But the visit to the pawnshop paid off and the book was soon selling soon by the million. (To date, and leaving aside the numerous pirate and unauthorised versions, the global sales are over fifty million copies – and counting.) The book made his author a star of the literary firmament and started a movement known a the “South American Boom”. Little remains today of the so-called “boom”, that was more a label than an actual explosion – of those included initially in the “boom generation” only Mario Vargas-Llosa, and perhaps Octavio Paz, have had a distinguished career. The other label given to García Márquez (the magic realism) is just that, a label. His works would not have any of it after the sixties. But “One Hundred Years…” was good enough to carry singly the torch of the reputation of almost a whole continent and to the day he died García Márquez kept in all South America and Spain the fame, status and charisma of rock stars.The next book García Márquez would publish was “The Autumn of the Patriarch”, and was a disappointment. The template moved from the Spanish classics to the fierce modernism of Joyce and Woolf and the novel consist in very long sentences (one per chapter) in the shape of monologues and streams of conscience, with the point of view and times of the actions shifting constantly. It didn't work – it never feels natural nor fits with the author prose, and the novel sold poorly - García Márquez wouldn't try it ever again. His next book, though, is one of his best. “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” is excellent, gripping – it defines and embodies the “can't put down” saying.He immersed right into “Love in Times of Cholera”, actually the story of the matrimony of his parents, which is, without the scope of “One Hundred…” also excellent.His works after “Love at the Times of Cholera” are interesting, but the overall quality goes on descending book after book. “The General in his Labyrinth” starts well but then is very repetitive; “Chronicle of a Kidnapping” doesn't decide between being a full journalistic report or a fiction story; “Of Love and Other Demons” is a good idea, artificially enlarged to make for a short novel; “Memories of my Sad Whores” is bad, pointless, almost to the point of being unnecessary.His real last worthy work is “Live to Tell the Tale”, an autobiography which García Márquez meant to complete with two other volumes. It reads like a very frank reminiscence in which the author recaps his life and praises fondly his favourite hobby: the music, and specifically Beethoven Haydn and The Beatles. The writer died in 2014 after a chain of ailments and he was already retired years before.García Márquez style is simple – he's in the antipodes of the other great writer in Spanish of the second half of the century, Jorge Luis Borges and his baroque patterns. The great merit of García Márquez is to sound musically with a very plain language. This is why his writing has been described as “poetic prose”. His other trademark is that he also keeps a clear separation from his characters, describing them from a distance (García Márquez very seldom does dialogue). He details movements, gestures and – constantly – different types of walking, but not faces. He wants us to know what the characters do, rather than how they are.García Márquez is at the same time grandiose as he makes us shudder with very touching details. The characters of “One Hundred Years…” are all direct heirs of the great themes of humanity – fear of uncertain fate, doubt, dignity. The central character is a Colonel, the eternal Aureliano Buendía, who is participant in regular and useless wars (“he lost them all”, we're told) in which the enemy or the very reason of the war are always uncertain. In all the author's novels the women are strong and the men must be always brave, but never abusive or cruel. In one of the best lines of all García Márquez work one character has been mocked. He tells the man who told the tasteless joke: “go home and get a weapon, because I'm going to try and kill you”.García Márquez is a superb writer, author of one of the best twenty novels of the XX Century and of at least two other ones that should be in any library. His figure and influence largely benefit of the lack of giants in literature in the second half of the Century. There're no equivalent after 1950 to the likes of Mann, Orwell, Faulkner or Camus – much less to Kafka, Proust or Joyce. But García Márquez raises deservedly as one of the true last giants of literature.And yet García Márquez did not write much – he admitted that before the days of computers and word-processors programs he averaged one book every five years, if that (with a personal computer he reduced the average to three years) . His works gravitates around his two best known novels, the superb “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Times of Cholera”, both written in the central part of his career. Everything he published before 1967 (the year of publication of “One Hundred…”) is preparation to reach the masterpiece; what he published after 1985 (when “Love in Times…” saw the light) is a sort of a slow decadence. Right in between he wrote his other masterpiece, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold”, in 1981.His journalism is all interesting, if irregular. It has been very finely compiled and commented in five thick volumes (“Obra Periodística”, Grijalbo; it remains untranslated into English to date). Of this collection, the best part are volumes four and five, which include the pieces García Márquez wrote for several newspapers, mainly Spanish. The articles dealing with the colonialism and its abuses, plus the legacy of the postcolonialism, both in South America and Africa, are some of the best pieces ever written on the matter.Love in the times of cholera is a masterpiece, almost as good as his best known work: "One hundred years of solitude". It's one of the great love stories ever written, driven efortlessly by the two main characters, the unforgetable (and invincible) Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza in a long flash-back along the whole book. At around 500 pages (depending on the edition) it never feels long - it reads as a short story.It's also an overlook funny book. The seduction of the young Florentino, his stories and sexual encounters as adult with his string of lovers, the first chats of the old couple, the character of the uncle, etc. The book is plagued with hilarious moments that lighten the underlying love tale.A masterpiece, no doubt; the peak of an illustrious career.

All fine I would buy from this supplier again

Well done