Love in the Time of Cholera

This book gets a rating of 1.5. I can't count the professors I had that described this book as the greatest love story ever. In some aspects, I would agree with that assessment. A young love strikes two people, is mistakenly overlooked as something else, and after a lifetime apart is reignited. It should be noted that this is a much easier read than One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I found confusing because so many of the characters in the novel had the same name. About twenty pages in there is an incident regarding soap or lack thereof that leads to this...

"The incident, of course, gave them the opportunity to evoke many other trivial quarrels from many other dim and turbulent dawns. Resentments stirred up other resentments, reopened old scars, turned them into fresh wounds, and both were dismayed at the desolating proof that in so many years of conjugal battling they had done little more than nurture their rancor."

This argument causes Juvenal (the husband) to leave the marital bed. Four months later - four months! - he returns to their bed to read and when Fermina (the wife) gives the signal it is time for him to go to the other bedroom so that she may sleep, he capitulates by stating the following: "Let me stay here...There was soap." Classic.

Enjoy the language in this book. It is as beautiful as the love story itself.