Re: Love in the Time of Cholera

Thanks for sharing your experience...really hard to reply to that.
Since it sounds like it didn't meet your expectations, it's hard to say
if the problem was with the book or with your expectations. I'd read
_100 Years_ as my first Marquez, just picking up a mass market paperback
in a dollar bookstore near the FL/GA border without knowing a thing
about the author, and fell in love with Marquez. My only expectations
of _Love_ were based upon my previous reading of _100 Years_ and nothing
else -- I hadn't spoken to anyone else about it.

I think I was lucky :).

The ending was a bit weird for me too, though, I think. I think the
weirdness may have been a part of the point, the weirdness consisting of
the traditional love story ending happening to a pair of 70 year olds
at the end of a lifetime of debauchery (at least for one of them), and
respectability for the other. As if to say no matter what, passion wins
out in the end (as nature won out at the end of the wonderful opening
chapter).

Jim

BookBritt99@aol.com wrote:

> I would love to read more things about the book, as I am planning on
> reading 100 Years of Solitude soon, and so it will be keeping in a
> sort of Marquezian thread. Thank you, John.
> I am not entirely sure I feel "let down" by the book. Bad phrasing
> on my part. I liked it, when I was expecting to love it. There were
> bits that I thought were wonderful- my favorite being the descriptions
> of the city and the jungles and the smells and things- I particularly
> loved the bit about the tea "tasting like window." But I didn't
> really like the characters much. They just seemed a little flat from
> me- in fact, my favorite characters were the Widows that Florentino
> Ariza slept with. The others didn't seem original or multi-dimesional
> enough. And the story was sort of an old one, unrequited love,
> bittersweet ending, that sort of thing. Other then that, I can't
> quite put my finger on what it was that didn't make me feel that
> coming out of the movie theater sort of catharsis that I was sure was
> coming.
> Britt

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Received on Sat Aug 23 13:01:42 2003