This book will remain close to my heart forever. It was the first time I had just completed a book and read about the author’s demise. Felt like a personal loss. But the rating would have been still 5 stars had he been alive.
A special thanks to Edith Grossman. Without her, this reading would not have been possible! Such a beautiful masterpiece that you do not even realise it is a work of translation.
I always thought it is the story that matters more than the writing style. Thanks to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, fondly called Gaba, I can no longer believe that. I am glad that I am writing this review after a few days, it has given me enough time to come out of the world where I was an inhabitant since sometime.
While I was reading the book, I was in a spell and had fallen irrevocably for Florentino Ariza as Gaba wanted despite that all he was. Retrospectively, now that I can think, I am able to find something wrong with him and even despise him for getting a female killed due to his irresponsible behavior or being a pedophile. Sleep with women with mutual agreement is different from taking advantage of someone so young and naive. I did not mind the uncountable affairs that he had, but not these two. But you know that Gaba has won, when I still can’t make myself from stop feeling for Florentino. Why? How? Its beyond reason, maybe that is love.
Taking you through a journey of 50 years, the book beautifully explains the different phases of love.
Let me try and explain in Gaba’s language
The young love
"To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of
her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter."
The marital love
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
The comfortable love
“It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or
excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”
Love you feel after the death of your beloved
“She would stop in the middle of whatever she was doing and slap herself on the forehead because she suddenly remembered something she had forgotten to tell him”.
Feeling his presence where he no longer was.
The love you waited your whole life for
“For her sake he had won fame and fortune without too much concern for his methods, for her sake he had cared for his personal appearance with a rigor that did not seem very manly to other men of his time, and he had waited for this day as no one else could have waited for anything or anyone in this world: without an instant of discouragement”.
The old-age love
"For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death".
I can sum up the review in five words- "Love makes a grandeur delusion".
Recommended to - Those who love being in love or at least in the idea of being in love.
