---
product_id: 1375419
title: "Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)"
price: "€ 55.42"
currency: EUR
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reviews_count: 8
url: https://www.desertcart.hr/products/1375419-love-in-the-time-of-cholera-oprahs-book-club
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---

# Epic multi-decade love story #1 Caribbean & Latin American Lit Oprah's Book Club Edition Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

**Price:** € 55.42
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## Summary

> 📖 Timeless love, legendary storytelling — don’t miss the book everyone’s talking about!

## Quick Answers

- **What is this?** Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)
- **How much does it cost?** € 55.42 with free shipping
- **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship
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## Why This Product

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## Key Features

- • **Top-Ranked Bestseller:** Be part of the conversation with a #1 bestseller in Caribbean & Latin American literature, boasting over 10,000 glowing reviews.
- • **Oprah's Seal of Approval:** Join the elite circle of readers who trust Oprah’s curated picks for timeless literary gems.
- • **Immersive Historical Setting:** Travel to a lush Caribbean port city at the turn of the 20th century, where love and society collide.
- • **Complex, Enduring Love Explored:** Dive deep into a narrative that challenges traditional romance with obsession, passion, and time’s transformative power.
- • **Award-Winning Latin American Classic:** Experience the magic of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel laureate, whose storytelling defines a generation.

## Overview

Love in the Time of Cholera, an Oprah's Book Club first Vintage Publishing edition, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s acclaimed novel exploring a lifelong, complex love set against a richly detailed Caribbean backdrop. Celebrated as a top bestseller in Caribbean and Latin American literature, this classic blends lyrical prose with profound reflections on love, obsession, and the passage of time, making it a must-read for discerning literary enthusiasts.

## Description

Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club) [Garcia Marquez, Gabriel] on desertcart.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club)

Review: Passion, Obsession, and the Passage of Time - Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is a wonderful book on love, time, and the endurance of the human heart. Set in a lush Caribbean city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the novel follows the lifelong connection between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. What begins as an intense youthful romance is abruptly severed, sending their lives in separate directions—yet Florentino remains steadfast in his devotion, waiting for decades in the hope that fate will bring them together once more. Marquez’s prose is nothing short of mesmerizing. His ability to blend lyrical storytelling with profound philosophical reflections makes the novel a deeply immersive experience. Love, in his vision, is not just an emotion but a force that evolves, perseveres, and sometimes even deceives. The novel doesn’t romanticize love in the traditional sense; instead, it explores its complexities—obsession, passion, companionship, etc. And the ways in which time reshapes our understanding of it. Beyond its central love story, the novel paints a vivid portrait of an era marked by social change, medical advancements, and the passage of generations. Marquez’s characters are flawed yet unforgettable, their desires and disappointments rendered with striking honesty. The narrative moves at a deliberate, almost meditative pace, which may not appeal to those looking for fast-moving plot twists. For readers willing to work with its rhythms, the reward is a fantastic story. Ultimately, Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel that lingers in the mind long after the final page. It challenges conventional notions of love and destiny, offering a deeply human exploration of what it means to love someone across a lifetime.
Review: The genius of Chaucer and Milton, though without answers to haunting questions - Marquez combines the genius of Chaucer's unreliable narrators with Milton's mockery of the epic protagonist. He has even managed to dupe his reviewer into believing in Florentino Ariza's eternal declaration of love for Fermina Daza is praiseworthy! His masterful mockery of that declaration through the unfolding of the story is at least as good as Fitzgerald's flattening of Gatsby's idealist notions of his love under the cold, profane moneyed world of Tom and Daisy. While Fitzgerald flattens idealism, this novel flattens the shallow ego-centric infatuation that many call love in this generation. A little observation reveals indicators of Marquez’s clear derision of ‘love’: 1) The narrator provides us an unmediated juxtaposition of two contrasting definitions of love: On one side, the narrator praises love as a thread of kindness and companionship woven through a tapestry of misunderstandings, trials, and temptations. Acts of kindness, forgiveness, and sanctification mark the story of Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza. On the other side, the same narrator praises love as a self-deceived ideal that is essentially projected onto Fermina, without recognition of who she is at heart. Florentino lives this love out in such a way that he convinces himself that acts of perfidy are actually acts of idolatrous devotion. A narrator who cannot distinguish between these two notions of love ought to evoke suspicion in any reader who has half a brain! 2) Florentino Ariza is like Gatsby gone promiscuously mad. 622 'love' affairs to preserve 'love'? The joke is on anyone who will believe it. A Gatsby who can't see the real Daisy for his idolization of her as a goddess is combined with a Marquis De Sade who takes every opportunity to objectify human beings as sexual objects. Ariza is a sexually deviant version of Jekyl and Hyde. He is so full of excrement, that he curtails his first visit to a widowed Fermina in order to gain relief by defecating in his own pants. 3) The path of fragmentation Ariza leaves in his wake is indescribably horrific. His 'love' affairs don't sizzle so much as they fizzle into a bleak, hopeless void covered only by the pretense of a shared desire to break things off. Percy Walker’s Binx would describe this as "dead, dead, dead." The pretense of 'love affairs' being anything but bleakly mechanical fornications is clearly shattered by Ariza's relationships with three women: 1) Sara Noriega, who will not hide her hostility at feeling used, 2) Olimpia Zuleta, who reveals the real cost of Ariza's campaign of careless seduction when her husband murders her, and 3) the capstone molestation of a 14-year-old school girl (one who is placed in his trust!) when he is in his 70s! Ariza’s selfishishness ends the girl's life by suicide while he still chases after his 'ideal' with only a passing thought for the tragic death of this girl he himself ruined! He is incapable of any meaningful attachment or responsability to the women he has screwed in so many ways. He loves no one, not even Fermina, but only loves his ideal of Fermina. His love is, in reality, nothing but an obtuse, self-centric, hellish lust twisted within the guise of idealistic love. 4) The final clue comes with a river boat that is stranded near the swamps. How fitting to end such a life in the stagnant, malodorous swamps of life! 'Love' that is merely a correlated amalgamation of so many discrete sexual experiences has no destination and no route out of stagnancy. There is no pilgrimage, no journey, no hope of redemption or even return to communion/community. As Edith Wharton's Countess Olenska told us, illicit love, for all its excitement, ends in a dark alley of bitter disappointments and disillusionment (the urban version of the stagnant swamp). And so our protagonist, like Milton's Lucifer, for all his boasting of achieving a great ideal, ends his life as a fragmented, isolated, impotent old man who drags his companions with him into the quagmire of hell. Marquez's genius for building the narrative by shifting time and individual character narratives in order to provide contrasts not only between love and lust as ideals, but also the inner struggle between love and lust in the individual, keeps the reader in a state of inner conflict. The attempt to decipher just what love is and is not builds in tension just like the building of crisis in ancient Greek theater. This playing with/on the reader's expectation thus reveals the reader's own flawed view of love as much as it reveals the flaws of the characters. You, the reader, are exposed! The final catharsis itself doesn't provide resolution so much as it exposes the reader's own conflict between reckless escape from community (fragmentation) in order to follow personal fullfillment and return to community (wholeness). This is somewhat similar to the unsettling relief one might encounter at the end of Oedipus Rex. The ending leaves us only with the daringly haunting question of what love is. This is assuredly better than presuming the trite answers that pervade contemporary culture(s), but one sometimes yearns for a Chaucer who not only poses daunting questions, but has the courage to answer them. But alas! That type of genius finds few appreciative minds given the spirit of the present age.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #15,068 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #136 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction #510 in Classic Literature & Fiction #554 in Literary Fiction (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars (10,152) |
| Dimensions  | 5.2 x 0.84 x 7.99 inches |
| Edition  | Reprint |
| ISBN-10  | 0307389731 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0307389732 |
| Item Weight  | 2.31 pounds |
| Language  | English |
| Part of series  | MARQUEZ 2014 |
| Print length  | 368 pages |
| Publication date  | October 5, 2007 |
| Publisher  | Vintage |

## Images

![Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club) - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/712UYItqnwL.jpg)
![Love in the Time of Cholera (Oprah's Book Club) - Image 2](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51EOWDWbf0L.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Passion, Obsession, and the Passage of Time
*by C***S on April 4, 2025*

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera is a wonderful book on love, time, and the endurance of the human heart. Set in a lush Caribbean city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the novel follows the lifelong connection between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza. What begins as an intense youthful romance is abruptly severed, sending their lives in separate directions—yet Florentino remains steadfast in his devotion, waiting for decades in the hope that fate will bring them together once more. Marquez’s prose is nothing short of mesmerizing. His ability to blend lyrical storytelling with profound philosophical reflections makes the novel a deeply immersive experience. Love, in his vision, is not just an emotion but a force that evolves, perseveres, and sometimes even deceives. The novel doesn’t romanticize love in the traditional sense; instead, it explores its complexities—obsession, passion, companionship, etc. And the ways in which time reshapes our understanding of it. Beyond its central love story, the novel paints a vivid portrait of an era marked by social change, medical advancements, and the passage of generations. Marquez’s characters are flawed yet unforgettable, their desires and disappointments rendered with striking honesty. The narrative moves at a deliberate, almost meditative pace, which may not appeal to those looking for fast-moving plot twists. For readers willing to work with its rhythms, the reward is a fantastic story. Ultimately, Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel that lingers in the mind long after the final page. It challenges conventional notions of love and destiny, offering a deeply human exploration of what it means to love someone across a lifetime.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The genius of Chaucer and Milton, though without answers to haunting questions
*by G***E on December 9, 2021*

Marquez combines the genius of Chaucer's unreliable narrators with Milton's mockery of the epic protagonist. He has even managed to dupe his reviewer into believing in Florentino Ariza's eternal declaration of love for Fermina Daza is praiseworthy! His masterful mockery of that declaration through the unfolding of the story is at least as good as Fitzgerald's flattening of Gatsby's idealist notions of his love under the cold, profane moneyed world of Tom and Daisy. While Fitzgerald flattens idealism, this novel flattens the shallow ego-centric infatuation that many call love in this generation. A little observation reveals indicators of Marquez’s clear derision of ‘love’: 1) The narrator provides us an unmediated juxtaposition of two contrasting definitions of love: On one side, the narrator praises love as a thread of kindness and companionship woven through a tapestry of misunderstandings, trials, and temptations. Acts of kindness, forgiveness, and sanctification mark the story of Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza. On the other side, the same narrator praises love as a self-deceived ideal that is essentially projected onto Fermina, without recognition of who she is at heart. Florentino lives this love out in such a way that he convinces himself that acts of perfidy are actually acts of idolatrous devotion. A narrator who cannot distinguish between these two notions of love ought to evoke suspicion in any reader who has half a brain! 2) Florentino Ariza is like Gatsby gone promiscuously mad. 622 'love' affairs to preserve 'love'? The joke is on anyone who will believe it. A Gatsby who can't see the real Daisy for his idolization of her as a goddess is combined with a Marquis De Sade who takes every opportunity to objectify human beings as sexual objects. Ariza is a sexually deviant version of Jekyl and Hyde. He is so full of excrement, that he curtails his first visit to a widowed Fermina in order to gain relief by defecating in his own pants. 3) The path of fragmentation Ariza leaves in his wake is indescribably horrific. His 'love' affairs don't sizzle so much as they fizzle into a bleak, hopeless void covered only by the pretense of a shared desire to break things off. Percy Walker’s Binx would describe this as "dead, dead, dead." The pretense of 'love affairs' being anything but bleakly mechanical fornications is clearly shattered by Ariza's relationships with three women: 1) Sara Noriega, who will not hide her hostility at feeling used, 2) Olimpia Zuleta, who reveals the real cost of Ariza's campaign of careless seduction when her husband murders her, and 3) the capstone molestation of a 14-year-old school girl (one who is placed in his trust!) when he is in his 70s! Ariza’s selfishishness ends the girl's life by suicide while he still chases after his 'ideal' with only a passing thought for the tragic death of this girl he himself ruined! He is incapable of any meaningful attachment or responsability to the women he has screwed in so many ways. He loves no one, not even Fermina, but only loves his ideal of Fermina. His love is, in reality, nothing but an obtuse, self-centric, hellish lust twisted within the guise of idealistic love. 4) The final clue comes with a river boat that is stranded near the swamps. How fitting to end such a life in the stagnant, malodorous swamps of life! 'Love' that is merely a correlated amalgamation of so many discrete sexual experiences has no destination and no route out of stagnancy. There is no pilgrimage, no journey, no hope of redemption or even return to communion/community. As Edith Wharton's Countess Olenska told us, illicit love, for all its excitement, ends in a dark alley of bitter disappointments and disillusionment (the urban version of the stagnant swamp). And so our protagonist, like Milton's Lucifer, for all his boasting of achieving a great ideal, ends his life as a fragmented, isolated, impotent old man who drags his companions with him into the quagmire of hell. Marquez's genius for building the narrative by shifting time and individual character narratives in order to provide contrasts not only between love and lust as ideals, but also the inner struggle between love and lust in the individual, keeps the reader in a state of inner conflict. The attempt to decipher just what love is and is not builds in tension just like the building of crisis in ancient Greek theater. This playing with/on the reader's expectation thus reveals the reader's own flawed view of love as much as it reveals the flaws of the characters. You, the reader, are exposed! The final catharsis itself doesn't provide resolution so much as it exposes the reader's own conflict between reckless escape from community (fragmentation) in order to follow personal fullfillment and return to community (wholeness). This is somewhat similar to the unsettling relief one might encounter at the end of Oedipus Rex. The ending leaves us only with the daringly haunting question of what love is. This is assuredly better than presuming the trite answers that pervade contemporary culture(s), but one sometimes yearns for a Chaucer who not only poses daunting questions, but has the courage to answer them. But alas! That type of genius finds few appreciative minds given the spirit of the present age.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Great Prose
*by S***Y on February 10, 2026*

Sr Márquez is a wonderful writer. The prose is incredible. He strings together thoughts in long sentences with exquisite language. The transitions from one subject to another happen almost as by accident. Characters come alive in the sentences as the story unfolds. Up until the end. Then the story just dies as if Sr Márquez tired of writing quit with an unsatisfactory final sentence. Read it for the prose and the early expression of a love story as it unfolds. Laugh at the subtle humor.

## Frequently Bought Together

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*Product available on Desertcart Croatia*
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*Last updated: 2026-03-04*