Join the HCSF Reading Group to discuss Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Sunday, July 21, 2024
4:30-6:00 pm PT
In-person
SF Location details will be announced to registrants a few days before the meeting.
HCSF Members Free, but RSVP required
Non-Members $10
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Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
354 pages
1998
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.
"This. . . radiant novel, is at once an old-fashioned love story, elegantly fashioned out of the clockwork pieces of romantic fiction (secret love letters, unrequited passions, noisy declarations of undying devotion and long, melancholy honeymoons spent at sea), and an anatomy of love in all its forms: the gushy, irrational love of adolescents and the mature love of people who have suffered loss and grief; the high-flown love, immortalized by poets, and the love without love found in bordellos and motels; marital love and adulterous love, spiritual love, physical love, even love that resembles cholera in its symptoms and its pain.
The other great subject of this novel, like Proust's 'Remembrance of Things Past,' is time - how time past shapes time present and how memory transfigures and redeems all that has gone before. We are shown, through the story of one woman and two men, the ways in which love changes and endures through time, and we are also shown the ways in which our apprehension of the fact of death constantly alters our ideals and our goals." (New York Times)
Meeting organizer:
Kirsten Miclau
readinggroup@harvardclubsf.org