Published 1985 / Length 348 pages
Musing on change and chance, this is a story about love across the ages told with terrific skill. The elegant formality of Márquez’s prose conjures a bygone era of civility and propriety, courtship and concealment. From his study of a marriage to his sketch of a widow locked into routines of remembrance, Márquez makes his characters complex beings with extensive inner lives. He introduces us to his three protagonists – queen-like, statuesque Fermina Daza, upstanding professional Juvenal Urbino and lovelorn Florentino Ariza – through a series of episodes and encounters, refusing to ‘sum them up’, thus displaying the consummate respect a great novelist has for his creations. The rare instances of reported speech in the book erupt as a culmination of the thoughts and feelings of both speaker and listener, to which we have already been privy. This technique allows the reader to fill in reams of subtext beneath the spoken words. Evocations of spaces warmed by the Caribbean sun are thick with rich description in this serene but lustrous gem of a novel.
‘There is no better introduction to the bejewelled, subtle magic of Márquez’s writing, sustained by interwoven tales at once pathetic and inspired. Edith Grossman’s exquisite translation allows none of the thrill of the language to escape.’ – LINDA, 33
• Does Márquez see youthful and mature love as fundamentally the same or profoundly different? Is young love idealized, or impetuous? Is romantic love a victory over age?
• Márquez has said of Fermina Daza: ‘She is the novel.’ But does he treat her two suitors fairly? Or is this love triangle uneven from the outset?
• Social constraints, that ‘tangle of conventions and prejudices’, infiltrate this story of lovers, requiring them to act with courage. Is challenge the essence of romance, and have we lost something in our more permissive age?
• Why do you think the image of love as the Holy Spirit appears time and again?
• How does the novel prove – or disprove – Márquez’s statement that ‘nothing in this world was more difficult than love’?
• Márquez, a Colombian, based the book loosely around the story of his parents’ courtship.
• Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.
• Controversially, the author is a lifelong supporter of Fidel Castro, who keeps a home for him in Havana, Cuba.
• Living to Tell the Tale by GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ – this dazzling autobiography sheds light on how the author’s immensely varied personal experiences shaped his preference for multilayered narratives.
• Middlemarch by GEORGE ELIOT – depicts a forbidden courtship sustained over time and against the odds.
• The Nice and the Good by IRIS MURDOCH – explores, in a thoroughly English setting, the differences between mature and immature love.