About the Book:

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people’s lives together for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza, who waits more than half a century to declare his undying love to the beautiful Fermina Daza, whom he lost to Dr. Juvenal Urbino so many years before, García Márquez has created a vividly absorbing fictional world, as lush and dazzling as a dream and as real and immediate as our own deepest longings. Now available for the first time in the Contemporary Classics series!

Book Review:  ★★★★★★

This is one of those books that the reviews seem to be all over the place.  You either loved it or you hated it — but there isn’t a lot of gray area.  I’m afraid I came down in the later category, mainly because I am such a story person.  I love to find and follow the story line, and then see how different elements support that story, and the message that the author is trying to convey.  Unfortunately, I felt like the story in this one kept getting lost in the minutia.

Don’t get me wrong, as far as descriptive writing goes, Mr. Marquez is one of the best I have ever encountered.  He has a real gift for descriptive writing, and not just about places and things.  Once he sets to describing something, it is amazing how easily it is to envision that entire setting, item, and even person.  Everything about his book lives through description, even when reading the translated version.

The only draw back to this is sometimes I felt like the story kept getting lost amongst all the descriptive details.  If you have ever tried to follow a story of someone that loves to digress — a lot — you know what I am trying to say.  I once knew a lady that if you were to have a conversation with her, she could move through twelve different topics, completely unrelated, like anyone else would move through water.  Her conversation was that fluid, but almost impossible to lock down, and figure out exactly what she was saying — if any thing. It wasn’t until I quit trying to find rhyme or reason to her conversation, and just allowed her to move from topic to topic at will that I quit getting frustrated with trying to have a conversation with her.

That is the way I felt about this story.  Just about the time I figured out where the story was going, it would get lost in a descriptive passage, and I would lose the entire track of the story.  That is not to say that the author didn’t stay with the story line beginning to end.  But as a reader I felt that the descriptive passages were interruption enough that it broke my train of thought, and it made it hard to get back to where I lost track of the original story line.

For a reader that is good at moving in and out of descriptive passages, and it doesn’t disrupt the enjoyment of their reading — this is a beautiful book.  But for me it was a frustrating read.  However, I consider that more a problem with the way I approach books, than in the way the book, itself was written and presented.  Mr. Marquez is an excellent author — this type of book, however, just wasn’t my type of read.  Further, due to much of the sexual content of the book, I don’t know that I would consider this age appropriate for younger readers.  After a while I started to get frustrated with the focus on the sexual exploits — as if it was one of the main focuses of the book, and love was based completely on the sexual aspects, and nothing else was important.  Overall, I wouldn’t chose to recommend this book to a general readership.  But for the right reader, this would be an excellent read.

Tags: Love, Romance

Category: Banned Books, Classics, Fiction, Historical Fiction