I was a trifle disappointed in Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, especially since Oprah gushed about what a great love story it was. I thought it was more a story of obsession than a love story. Plus, I have a basic aversion to reading a translation. The flow of the language is lost, and I find myself occasionally wondering if a particularly odd phrase was translated too literally. The title sounds so morbid, but the story really has nothing to do with cholera. In fact, there's a lot of humor, although it might be funnier in Spanish. My favorite part was where Florentino was writing love letters for other couples and discovered that, in one case, he was repesenting both the man and the woman and carrying on a correspondence with himself. The ending was kind of chirpy, but I guess that's appropriate since one of the main characters dies at the beginning trying to retrieve a parrot. I know, bad pun. A better love story is Possession by A. S. Byatt.
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