How Gabriel García Márquez Made Madness Smell Like Roses
A Review of Love in the Time of Cholera
It was a Wednesday when I found it, half buried under a stack of abandoned romance novels at a secondhand bookstore in Torrance. The spine was cracked. The pages had that yellowed tint of time and cigarettes. It didn’t scream “masterpiece.” It whispered. Whispered like an old ghost who used to know something about love, and wasn’t sure anymore. The title hooked me, and not just because of the irony of “cholera” sitting side by side with “love.” It felt... honest. Because love, like cholera, has symptoms: sweating, palpitations, diarrhea of the soul.
I bought it for three bucks. That was the best investment I’ve ever made in sadness.
Now, Love in the Time of Cholera has long been praised as one of the great love stories of modern literature. People read it with trembling fingers and hopeful hearts. They quote it at weddings. They write think pieces with titles like “What We Can Learn From Florentino Ariza’s Unshakable Love.” And to that I say: have we all lost our damn minds?
Because let’s be clear: this isn’t a love story. It’s a slow-motion car crash narrated in prose so gorgeous, you forget to scream.
Let’s talk about Florentino. Sweet, twisted, delusional Florentino. A man so committed to the idea of romantic permanence that he waits fifty-one years, nine months, and four days to finally “get the girl.” Sounds noble, right? Sounds like love? Except he’s not really waiting. He’s collecting. Women. Experiences. Regrets. Over six hundred documented affairs while allegedly saving his true love for Fermina Daza. As if infidelity doesn’t count when it's done in the name of some greater, abstract devotion.
This is where Márquez plays his most delicious trick: he makes you root for Florentino even as he slowly unveils how batshit he is. He’s the kind of man who writes daily letters for years, who practically stalks the object of his affection, who beds women as if each new conquest is a desperate attempt to outrun time itself. The man’s a romantic, yes. But he’s also an addict, and the drug is longing.
There’s a moment in the novel (one of many, mind you) where Florentino watches Fermina from a distance. She’s now married to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, the embodiment of civilization and order. And Florentino? He just…waits for decades. Like a man who’s convinced that time is a problem he can outlast. It’s delusional. It’s terrifying. And it’s painfully human.
Fermina Daza, for her part, doesn’t come off as some wilting flower caught between two lovers. She’s sharp. She’s decisive. She sees through Florentino’s youthful romanticism early on and tells him, in essence, “Grow up.” So she marries Urbino, a decision that’s less about passion and more about security. Urbino is steady, respected, a man of hygiene and honor. But he’s not without his flaws. There’s a sterile quality to their marriage, a routine that wears on Fermina like a coat one outgrows but keeps wearing out of habit.
Their relationship, in many ways, is the mirror opposite of Florentino’s madness. Where his love burns chaotically across time, hers settles into something more familiar, more survivable. And yet, when Urbino dies, falling off a ladder while chasing a parrot, no less, Florentino swoops in like a vulture who’s been practicing his lines for half a century.
And here’s where the reader splits. Some see this final union as the triumph of enduring love. Others, like myself, raise an eyebrow and mutter, “What the hell, Fermina?”
Because by then, Florentino is old. Tired. Full of ghosts. And Fermina? She’s too wise not to know what this is. Not love, exactly. Not the giddy stuff of youth. But maybe something... adjacent. Maybe they meet not in passion but in peace. Maybe they’re both just too worn out to keep fighting time. Maybe love, when it lasts that long, becomes something else entirely: a kind of mutual truce with mortality.
The Setting: Love Drenched in Decay
Let’s not forget where all this is happening. The unnamed Caribbean port city, so obviously inspired by Cartagena, pulses through every chapter like a fever dream: the stench of river water, the oppressive heat, the scent of jasmine mixed with sewage. Márquez is a master of the sensory, and he transforms the setting into another character that constantly reminds us that beauty and rot live side by side; love and cholera, passion and death.
The metaphor of cholera itself is no accident. On the surface, it's a nod to the real disease sweeping through the city. But underneath? It’s love. A disease of the body and mind. It makes you weak, irrational, bedridden with longing. Márquez knew this. He wrote it as both confession and condemnation. Love, to him, was a parasite with good PR.
A Romance That’s More Mirror Than Map
What makes Love in the Time of Cholera extraordinary is its prose; yes, Márquez could describe the texture of air and make it sing. He also dares to present love not as salvation but as struggle. A mirror that exposes you rather than flatters you.
We’re used to love stories with climaxes and resolutions. Kisses in the rain. Grand gestures. Here, love is quieter. Slower. Sometimes, even grotesque. There’s a scene toward the end, on a riverboat, where Fermina and Florentino finally consummate their relationship. And it’s not sexy. It’s clumsy, raw, and almost painfully real. Two old bodies remembering what young hearts once felt. But somehow, it’s beautiful because it’s true.
Márquez isn’t interested in idealizing love. He’s too honest for that. Instead, he gives us love as we live it: flawed, repetitive, inconvenient, and unkillable.
Why I Keep Coming Back
The first time I read this novel, I was nursing a fresh wound. Someone had left. Or rather, someone had never fully arrived, and I was left circling their absence like Florentino at the gates of Fermina’s memory. It hit me hard. Not because I saw myself in him, but because I was terrified I might.
But on second reading years later, with a little more heartbreak under my belt, I saw it differently. Not as a guide to love, but as a warning. A fable about what happens when you confuse longing for connection and obsession for meaning. Florentino is what happens when you build a shrine to someone who’s walked away and keep lighting candles for decades.
And yet, damn it, I loved him. I pitied him. I admired his stamina. Because who among us hasn’t held on a little too long to something that was already gone? Who hasn’t mistaken persistence for purpose?
The Personal Stuff Márquez Poured Into This Book
And here’s the beautiful irony: Márquez based this madness on the love story of his own parents. His father, a telegraphist with little to his name but stubborn hope, wooed Márquez’s mother against her family’s wishes. They thought he was a bum. He thought he was a poet. Turns out, they were both a little bit right.
Márquez wrote a tribute and a meditation. He wanted to know what love looked like after the fireworks were gone, after the children had grown up, after the body began to betray you. He wanted to prove that love still existed, past the age Hollywood stops casting. And that’s why, for all my sarcasm and side-eyes, I love this book. Because it dares to ask: what if love isn’t about happiness? What if it’s about endurance? About stubbornness? About two people simply choosing not to let go?
Final Thought: So, is Love in the Time of Cholera Romantic?
Yes. But not in the way you think.
It’s romantic in the way that war stories are romantic. In the way that broken-down cars with 300,000 miles on them are romantic. It’s the romance of survival. Of staying. Of refusing to die before your heart does. This book doesn’t want to make you swoon. It wants to make you ache. It wants to haunt you a little. And that’s why it works. So if you’re looking for a neat ending, go elsewhere. But if you’re looking for something truer, something messier, something that crawls under your skin and mutters, “This is what love really looks like when nobody’s watching,” then read this.
Then read it again.
And don’t be surprised if, somewhere along the way, you start seeing your own ghost reflected in Florentino’s obsession or Fermina’s weariness.
That’s Márquez’s final trick. He doesn’t just write characters.
He writes us.
