Love in the Time of Cholera

El amor en los tiempos del cólera, 1985, translated by Edith Grossman in 1988. Florentino Ariza waits half a century for Fermina Daza, who married someone else; when her husband dies, he is still waiting. It is usually described as a love story and is at least as much an argument about whether fifty years of devotion is fidelity or a form of illness — the title keeps the two readings deliberately available.

Context: the Fantasy section of the a16z list, listed under García Márquez’s selected works, third of five. The team’s note on him is about method rather than plot: impossible events — levitating priests, rain that lasts years, an insomnia plague — folded into everyday life without comment.

Connections

• a16z Infra Reading List — the list this came from.
• Gabriel García Márquez — the author.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude — the first of his titles on the list, already carded.
• Literature — where this sits in the corpus.