Love in the Time of Cholera Chosen for Oprah's Book Club

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is the most recent Oprah’s Book Club pick. "It is so beautifully written that it really takes you to another place in time and will make you ask yourself how long could you or would you wait for love," Oprah Winfrey wrote on her Website.

In his 1985 novel El amor en los tiempos del colera (translated as Love in the Time of Cholera, 1988), Garcia Marquez explores various manifestations of love and examines themes relating to aging, death, and decay in a blend of fact and fable based in part on recollections of his parents' marriage.

Set in a South American community plagued by recurring civil wars and cholera epidemics from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, the novel begins with the death of Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who leaves behind his wife of fifty years, Fermina Daza. Soon after Urbino's death, however, a man from Fermina's distant past appears on her doorstep. It is Florentino Ariza, a telegraph operator who had once secretly wooed her through letters and serenades until her father learned of the romance and put an end to it. The rest of the novel recounts Florentino's determination to resume the passionate courtship of a woman who had given him up for a wealthier, more distinguished suitor so many years before.

Garcia Marquez's best-known novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was an Oprah's Book Club pick in 2004.

Take a peek inside Love in the Time of Cholera, courtesy of AmazonOnlineReader.

The movie version starring Benjamin Bratt and Javier Bardem is slated for a November 16 release.


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Visit our Biography Resource Center to learn more about Gabrial Garcia Marquez (library card is required)