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It is a rich commodious novel whose narrative power is matched only by it's generosity of vision.

It is a love stroy of astonishing power and delicious comedy... humane, richly comic, almost unbearably touching and altogether extraordinary




Love in the time of cholera: An Excerpt

IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Dr. Juvenal Urbino noticed it as soon as he entered the still darkened house where he hed hurried on an urgent call to attend a case that for him has lost all urgency many years before. The Abtillean refugee Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, disabled war veteran, photographer of children, and his most sympathetic opponent in chess, had escaped the torments of memory with the aromatic fumes of gold cyanide.

At one window the splender of dawn was just beginning to illuminate the stifling, crowded room that served as both bedrroomm and laboratory, but there was enough light for him to recognize at once the authority of death.

His city stood unchanging at the edge of time: the same burning dry city of his nocturnal terrors and the solitary pleasures of puberty, where flowers rusted and salt corroded, where nothing had happened for four centuries except a slow aging among withered laurels and putrefying swamps. In winter sudden devastating downpours flooded the latrines and turned the streets into sickening bogs. In summer an invisible dust as harsh as red-hot chalk was blown into even the best-protected corners of the imagination by mad winds that took the roofs off the hiouse and carried away chilldren through the air. On saturdays poor mullattoes, along with their domestic animals and kitchen utensils, tumultuously abandoned their hovels of cardboard and tin on the edges of the swamps and in jubilent assault took over the rocky beaches of the colonial district. During the weekened they danced without mercy, drank themselves blind on home-brewed alcohol, made wild love among the icaco plants, and on Sunday at midnight they broke up their own party with bloody free-for-alls.






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Last Updated: December 11, 1998