El amor en los tiempos del cólera

The love story between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza, set in a small Caribbean port town and spanning more than sixty years, might seem like a melodrama of thwarted lovers who ultimately triumph through the grace of time and the strength of their own feelings, since García Márquez delights in employing the most classic devices of traditional serial novels. But this time—for once successive, not cyclical—this setting, and these characters are like a tropical mixture of plants and clay that the master's hand molds and with which he fantasizes at will, ultimately leading to the realms of myth and legend. The juices, scents, and flavors of the tropics nourish a hallucinatory prose that, on this occasion, reaches the swaying harbor of a happy ending.