THE DUST HAS SETTLED AND NOW, with the benefit of distance, I have to conclude that Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel I am very glad I read but cannot take too seriously. Indeed, how do I even know that it was, as I argued, beautifully written?

Ruth Schanz-Harper suggested that I can have no concept of how well the novel is written unless I read it in the original language. All I am doing is commenting on the translation. This was raised at the Cheltenham Literature Festival — where Cholera was the Big Read — and the feedback was that the most recent Penguin edition of Márquez's book is a wonderful translation. However, I take Ruth's point; something is always lost in translation, and maybe something is gained.

The stumbling block may not just be the language barrier. Is Márquez's fantastical style more acceptable to readers in Colombia than those in, say, Carlisle? Is Cholera passionate — or is it ludicrous? Is it breathtaking — or just a rollercoaster built on preposterous relationships? I happily whizzed along at the time, but now it all seems rather silly.

Star letter

My book club has a tendency to go for serious fiction, biographies and non-fiction so Love in the Time of Cholera was quite a departure. I have to say we were looking forward to reading it as Márquez is one of those authors with a massive reputation and yet none of us had read him before.

It turned out to be a very good choice for a reading group as we all disagreed as to whether it deserved the plaudits. One or two thought it ridiculous and another member could not finish it. I enjoyed it however. I liked its uninhibited style. It is the sort of novel you have to decide to run with; there is no point in stopping every few minutes to point out that a deed is unrealistic or a character is not rounded. I agree that it is not about true love. It is about obsession and Florentino Ariza is a stalker, a main character it is hard to have sympathy for. I did not root for him to win Fermina Daza but nor did I hope he would fail.

Flora Edwards, London

October 27, 2007

Don't worry about finding out the ending, your real challenge is kowing what it means. Is this a masterpiece or merely over-rated?

SOME OF YOU MAY NOT HAVE finished Love in the Time of Cholera yet, so I would normally try to write about it without mentioning the ending. But it hardly matters with this novel as no one can agree what the ending means. Come to think of it, nobody really agrees what Love in the Time of Cholera is about; making it a perfect book club choice.

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel was the featured title at a Books Group session at The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. We met in a lovely Regency hotel, and I had expected the session to be packed with admirers of Márquez. But some of those who turned up were either equivocal about this book or found it too difficult or unappetising even to finish.

This revelation was a delight. Márquez is spoken about in such reverential terms that I used to avoid his books simply because I do not like to be told that something was beautiful. By all means tell me that a novel is important, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder. As it turned out, I do think he writes beautifully, but I can also see that his style might be considered irritating.

It nagged at me, for example, that Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, the disabled war veteran found dead at the beginning of the book, never really reappears. In this regard Márquez is consistent. He often introduces vivid characters, then, just as you are intrigued by them, he drops them. But Jeremiah seems significant, so should we not know more about him?

I concluded that opening the novel with a man who kills himself because he does not want to live beyond the age of 60 provides an important clue to what Love in the Time of Cholera is trying to say. It is about the relationship between love and age and says that first love is so powerful that all other love pales by comparison. Or perhaps that is what it is saying — because you could equally make a strong case that it highlights the stupidity of teenage infatuation. At the hotel we decided to stop talking about love and to be more precise. There are many kinds of love and that felt by Florentino Ariza for Fermina Daza was not necessarily true love.

Many agreed that it was adoration and quickly turned into obsession. It was suggested that, far from being a heroic figure, Florentino Ariza is more of a creepy stalker. When you list everything that he does in the book, he sounds appalling.

His greatest crime must be the way that he treats the 12-year-old America Vicuna, entrusted to him as her guardian because he is a blood relative: “He culti-vated her during a slow year of Saturdays at the circus, Sundays in the park with ice cream, childish late afternoons, and he won her confidence, he won her affection, he led her by the hand, with the gentle astuteness of a kind grandfather, toward his secret slaughterhouse.”

Poor America is unlucky in so many ways, but suffers most because it is while she is sleeping with her guardian that he discovers that Dr Juvenal Urbino, the husband of the woman he loves and believes he has always loved, is dead. America believes that her guardian is too old to have plans for marriage and the reader is finally convinced that if Florentino can abandon the pale, delightful and blossoming America, his devotion to Fermina must be all-consuming.

The more I discussed this novel, the more cross I became. I did not set out wanting to be negative, but I found more to criticise than to praise. This is unusual for me, because usually I make up my mind about a title before the discussion, then stick to my opinion and defend it.

My annoyance at Love in the Time of Cholera’s failure to go into any detail about the politics of the region was shouted down. Everyone else thought that, just because I did not know about Colombia’s fighting factions, Márquez was not obliged to spell them out.

Novels set in the First World War do not have to explain the conflict, and authors can assume that readers will know already. Similarly, South American readers will understand why Fermina Daza spies so many murder victims as she peers down from her hot air balloon.

But most people at Cheltenham agreed that is annoying when authors issue instructions. Márquez warns readers not to fall into his “trap”. Presumably this means that we are not supposed to treat Love in the Time of Cholera simply as a love story. But most good novels can be read at different levels and surely it is the reader’s prerogative to decide how they absorb a book.

Perhaps the trap involves how to interpret the ending. Nobody agreed if it was meant to be literal or metaphorical, happy or sad, a triumph for Florentino Ariza or a punishment. For many it was unsatisfactory, for others uplifting. I found it neat that leaving the lovers on a boat flying the flag of cholera, reminds us both of the title and the fact that love can be a disease.



October 12, 2007

To mark the 80th birthday of the master, a classic that is so much more than a soppy story of love

TO MARK Gabriel García Márquez’s 80th birthday, Love in the Time of Cholera is the Big Read at this year’s Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. The idea is that hundreds at the event will read it at the same time.

Next month a film of the book is out. Its tag line is: “How long would you wait for love?” which may annoy admirers of Márquez — this is not a soppy love story; or rather it is not just a soppy love story. You cannot escape the fact that Florentino Ariza falls in love at first sight and spends his life trying to remember or forget the woman he adores. For him love is a disease, a form of cholera.

This beautiful and magical novel (translated by Edith Grossman) opens with the discovery of a body, which unsettles Dr Juvenal Urbino, husband of Fermina Daza, the woman Ariza loves. It is a curious construct, Márquez squeezes the life and death out of the doctor in the early pages so that Ariza’s introduction, although dramatic, seems irrelevant, even annoying. Who is he? What right has he to proclaim love for the widow?

It is easy to understand why Márquez is so many people’s favourite author. When Ariza receives a letter from Fermina, he spends “the rest of the afternoon eating roses and reading the note letter by letter, over and over again, and the more he read the more roses he ate, and by midnight he had read it so many times and had eaten so many roses that his mother had to hold his head as if he were a calf and force him to swallow a dose of castor oil”

I could read that description over and over.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Penguin, £8.99, 368pp

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