The author warns "you have to be careful not to fall into my trap."Like all great works of Art , it is for the reader to define this trap , though they will be the least well placed to even see if they have been ensnared by it, each according to their own perception.For some it will be a superficial love story , for others a tragic tale of magic gone awry , for me it is the eternal transcendence that goes beyond the physical , temporal , material to a linearity that knows no limit.
This video is from a reader who is appreciative that there is more than meets the eye to this story , seeing it as a meditation on obsession and passion , what one might call the exploration of the reality within the magic.
This review from the perspective of a Woman from The London Review Of Books looks at the way love continues when the initial attractions of love have withered away.
"They are not immune to history. And they are old. Florentino Ariza is bald. The first night of romance, Fermina Daza sends him away, saying: ‘Not now, I smell like an old woman.’ But they are not merely products of personal and public history. ‘Both were lucid enough to realise, at the same fleeting instant, that the hands made of old bones were not the hands they imagined before touching. In the next moment, however, they were.’ Garcia Marquez has brought a new depth to the meaning of the word ‘magic’."
This review from The New York Times also looks to how love in not bound by time , space or the material but seems attuned to the limitless dimensions of the soul
''The trouble,'' his uncle replies, ''is that without river navigation, there is no love.'' For Florentino this happens to be literally true: the shape of his life is defined by two momentous river voyages, half a century apart. On the first he made his decision to return and live forever in the city of Fermina Daza, to persevere in his love for as long as it might take. On the second, through a desolate landscape, he journeys into love and against time, with Fermina, at last, by his side. There is nothing I have read quite like this astonishing final chapter, symphonic, sure in its dynamics and tempo, moving like a riverboat too, its author and pilot, with a lifetime's experience steering us unerringly among hazards of skepticism and mercy, on this river we all know, without whose navigation there is no love and against whose flow the effort to return is never worth a less honorable name than remembrance -at the very best it results in works that can even return our worn souls to us, among which most certainly belongs ''Love in the Time of Cholera,'' this shining and heartbreaking novel"
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