The setting? Many, many years ago (around the 1900′s) in ripped – apart – politically – disorganised – overtook – by- cholera – Columbia (if I am not mistaken) two people find each other and fall in love. Nothing new to that, right? Even in the hardest of times, people have found time for love, and I find that natural. Unfortunately for them, the woman is meant to marry someone else and eventually does so. However, Florentino Ariza, the man who loved her, decided to wait until she would be free for him again. That being about 50 years and about 500 pages for the reader. For Florentino waited alright, but he waited and waited…on my nerves!

The whole book is actually about how he is waiting for her. Because the first part about how they meet and fall in love is merely insignificant. Cholera passes them by, wars, the first flight of man and every imaginable event. Florentino waits. Of course, not by himself. He finds mistresses in the most unthinkable places: widows, 14 year old girls, housewives, whores, poets…the whole lot. There probably wouldn’t be a living female whom he did not try to conquer. All in the wait, of course. Basically, we are forced (actually, I am beginning to think I am a masoquist, since no one was  pointing a gun at my head obliging me to keep reading. I realised though that with books like these I tend to wait for amazing, breathtaking endings. Which usually fail to appear.) to wait along with Florentino, witnessing at the same time his many, often disgusting adventures with women. We see the changes in his body, from around 20 years old, when he was young and virile, to the sad age of 70 and something, when, well, his love making is not so…passionate anymore. I could call this a bildungsroman, since he actually evolves in a very strange way during it, growing up, but yet remaining the same boy who wished that a certain girl was his.

Fermina Daza is, on the other hand, a pragmatic. She is cold and decided when it comes to love, she accepts marriage as a friendship rather than a lustful relationship, she is shocked to find Florentino has been waiting and waiting…

I would like to tell you how it ends, to make you skip 400 pages and just find out if they end up tpgether or not. But, as I was saying, apparently this is not the point. The point is to find out how they turn out to be, after 50 years of waiting for each other (mostly on Florentino’s side, with the spicing it up and everything). I know there are people who see more in this book than I do, but I definitely wouldn’t reread it. Or see the movie. I think the book was enough, I don’t need another 2 hours on the same subject. Maybe others enjoyed this book. Maybe there’s something in it that I don’t see.

All in all, for the fans of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, it is probably a masterpiece. For me it was a ‘must read’ that I would only recommend to people who see more to it than I do.

Enjoy