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Vee
1.0 out of 5 stars Sordid, sleazy, disgusting
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 April 2018
Verified Purchase
This isn’t a book about love and there isn’t much in it about cholera, other than dead bodies lying around: it is a book about a sex addict, a sexual predator, a stalker who used his obsession with a woman he had never even had a conversation with as an excuse to not develop an adult relationship. He was even described as a “hunter” on his excursions looking for women. Some of Florentino’s behaviour was psychopathic, but the author didn’t have the knowledge or skill to make him consistently so: the book lacked psychological depth, the characters were shallow. The author had absolutely no understanding of female psychology and his main female character’s only redeeming feature was her physical beauty: other than that she was thoroughly bad-tempered.
The book wasn’t believable: Florentino Ariza never ate fruit or vegetables and was constipated (as you’d expect on his diet); he drank 30 cups of coffee a day – so his breath would have stunk and his teeth would have been stained – and yet we’re expected to believe that he managed to attract and seduce over 600 women? Do the maths – even over 50 years, that’s 12 a year, one new woman a month – yet some of his “relationships” lasted years. I was reminded of a line in the series House when Dr Chase had been promiscuous and another doctor described his genitals as “A petrie dish of STDs.” There was only a brief mention of all the sexually transmitted diseases this character would have been riddled with: he had gonorrhea, genital warts and what sounded like herpesvirus. I simply cannot believe that women over 100 years ago would have behaved like this book describes; would have taken the chances of unwanted pregnancies. OK, I know it was fiction, but it stretched credulity too far. The book was like a stingy dirty old man’s dream – to find a bunch of women who would have sex with a man who was unwilling to make any commitment to them, with somebody who gives absolutely nothing in return except an STD! It got worse towards the end: when the “hero” of the book, the 76 year old, with his bad comb-over and false teeth, groomed and “seduced” – i.e. raped – his 14 year old ward. And the author portrayed this as her wanting to have sex with him: a typical pedophile justification for their vile acts. What 14 year old wouldn’t get turned on by giving sponge baths and enemas to a disgusting, smelly old man? I am heartily sick of the justification of child abuse within the media: pedophilia appears to be rampant amongst the powerful and rich: see Lydia Cacho’s books on her courageous exposés of child sex trafficking in South America: see Paterson’s book “Filthy Rich” about the Clinton’s convicted pedophile friend, Jeffery Epstein; see Nick Bryant’s and John de Campo’s books about The Franklin Scandal on the abuse of children in Franklin, Omaha; and of course the UK media is full of emerging revelations about politicians and celebrities. What’s so worrying about these cases is the collusion of the police and FBI and the so-called “justice system" covering up for the perpetrators.
Just reading the book made me feel dirty and contaminated: there were frequent descriptions of filthy places, a horrible description of three floating, bloated corpses, one of whom was a little girl. The author frequently described the stench. The book evokes a hellish place, insect bites, lice, raw sewage, and rotting corpses. Puts me off ever visiting Colombia!
The book began with the end, so any curiosity was eradicated: you don’t get to wonder what happened to them because you know already. Not that you’d give a stuff: the main characters were thoroughly boring and unlikeable so who cares what happened to them! Really nothing happened in the book, it was like a series of short vignettes. It was like reality TV. Other reviewers found it amusing – I could see where the author had tried to be funny – but he couldn’t really bring it off. As other reviewer’s have said, the continued use of both the characters names became very tedious although I accepted that this was likely a cultural thing. And the chapters were interminable.
I have read that other books of Marquez are just as flippant as this one was about the effect of rape upon a woman or child. Love In The Time of Cholera was a thoroughly unpleasant book and I will never read another by this author: whom I suspect is nothing but a dirty old man writing about what I hope are his fantasies, but - given that he is an establishment figure – could be his experiences."