Four decades after its publication, Gabriel García Márquez's 'Love in the Time of Cholera' continues to captivate readers, much like Jorge Isaacs's 'María' since 1867. Both novels explore romantic love in distinct historical Colombian contexts. García Márquez drew inspiration from his parents' story, releasing the book three years after his 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.
In December 1985, Colombian bookstores sold out in just two days with Gabriel García Márquez's new novel, 'Love in the Time of Cholera', an unexpected Christmas gift for readers. Released three years after the author received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982, the work depicts the obsessive and persistent love between Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, delayed for 53 years, seven months, and eleven days. García Márquez always stressed that the story was based on his parents' relationship, viewing it as his most researched and least fictional novel, saved for his literary maturity after triumphs like 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'.
This novel is compared to Jorge Isaacs's 'María', published in 1867, one of the most read in Colombian literary history. While 'María' portrays a romantic and fatal romance on an aristocratic hacienda with colonial echoes and post-slavery servitude, 'Love in the Time of Cholera' is set in the port city of Cartagena from the late 19th to early 20th century, shaped by slave trade, state bureaucracy, and the cholera pandemic that ravaged coastal areas.
Both works highlight loves thwarted by class differences and socioeconomic contexts: republican federalism in 'María' and neglect in public health in García Márquez's tale. The author rejected direct autobiography, later choosing memoirs like 'Living to Tell the Tale' in 2002. In the novel, García Márquez champions love in old age, countering views of elderly isolation, and contrasts romantic vitality with suicide over lost love, as in the character Jeremiah de Saint-Amour.
Book quotes illustrate this depth: 'The following days were hot and endless... fleeing the invisible cholera, fleeing the larval wars' (pp. 457-458), evoking abandonment and violence. And in the ending: 'it frightened him with the late suspicion that it is life, not death, that has no limits' (p. 473). These unsurpassable narratives have gauged their impact through generations' emotions, beyond literary critiques.
