Gabriel Garcia Marquez's, "Love in the Time of Cholera."

Love in the Time of Cholera is a sensuous feast, a dissection of love in all its flavors. Every type of love is an ingredient, a plotline in this rewarding stew. Central to the story is Florentino's unrequited love for Fermina. Closely linked by his marriage to Fermina, Dr. Juvenal plays a major role in the story as well. Florentino's beyond-obsessive love strangely steers him with such clarity through everything, making him a wise person seasoned in all the weathers of life. In a way, when Florentino finally grows out of his adolescent ways, we realize that though his love was pure, he needed to be made into such a man in order to deserve what he yearned for. Through the many characters that populate the story, Marquez shows the shallow, selfish, greedy, and vain aspects of love along with the noble, faithful, tragic and principled side. The true brilliance of Marquez is that while the world he shows us seems uniquely his own, it also reverberates with universal truth. So, the novel is as rich, magical, wild and unpredictable as life itself.

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