Love in the Time of Cholera

Cholera is less backdrop than metaphor: disease as the price of feeling too much. Florentino Ariza waits fifty-one years for Fermina Daza and García Márquez asks whether that is devotion or pathology. The pandemic at the edges bleeds into everything. Even love, here, smells faintly of death. The novel asks whether waiting fifty years is love or merely the refusal to stop waiting.