Love in the times of cholera

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Love in the Times of Cholera (Spanish El amor en los tiempos del cólera ) is a novel by the Colombian Nobel Prize winner for literature, Gabriel García Márquez . The original in Spanish was published in 1985 .

overview

After the first part of the framework plot (Kp. 1 and 6), an authorial narrator chronologically unfolds the magical, fantastic love story of Florentino Arizas and the beautiful Fermina Daza, who got to know each other as adolescents in the Colombian port city of Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast. This platonic relationship is ended by Fermina's father because he only accepts a rich and respected son-in-law for his daughter. Doctor Juvenal Urbino de la Calle is his preferred candidate. After three years, Fermina gives in to the solicitation of the socially superior doctor and marries him for about 50 years. Ariza swore eternal love to her friend. The hope that his wish will be fulfilled determines his life and is the driving force behind his professional and social career (Kp. 2–5). Chapters 1 and 6 follow on from this review. After Urbino's death, the mature Florentino proposes again to the widow and wins her over with a new advertising strategy after hundreds of typewriter letters and a steamboat trip on the Río Magdalena .

content

Kp. 1

The novel begins around 1930 on a Pentecost Sunday when the 81-year-old doctor Juvenal Urbino dies in Cartagena when he tries to get his parrot from the tree and falls from the ladder. A series of predictions precedes Urbino's death: The suicide of his friend, a refugee from the West Indies, Jeremiah de Saint-Amour. The feast at Doctor Lácides Olivella's, which almost drowned in the torrential rain. The damage to the house and garden from the tragicomic attempts to capture the parrot. His funeral and funeral ceremony the next day were also affected by floods. At the farewell to the mourners, the 72-year-old widow surprisingly approaches the four-year-old Florentino Ariza with the words: "Fermina, I have waited for this opportunity for over half a century to swear eternal loyalty and love to you again." Fermina reacts indignantly and sends him away.

Kp. 2–5 tell in retrospect the romantic love of the two young people, their separation and the following 50 years of development in a mixture of reality representation and incredible exaggeration.

Kp. 2

The romance begins in the early 1870s, when 18-year-old Florentino Ariza sees 13-year-old Fermina for the first time and swears loyalty and eternal love to her in a letter. Florentino, the illegitimate son of the shipowner Pio Quinto Loayza and the haberdashery Tránsito Ariza, was working as a telegraph assistant at the time, played the violin well, reads a lot, is a dreamer like his father and likes to immerse himself in the world of literary figures. Fermina has just moved from the country to the city with her father Lorenzo Daza and aunt Escolástica and is attending the “Presentación de la Santísima Virgen” as a schoolgirl, which prepares people for marriage and family life. Her father earned money as a mule dealer in the province of San Juan de la Ciénaga and bought a house in Cartagena. His beautiful daughter is supposed to marry a rich man from the upper class after graduating from school. At first, Fermina reacts with fear and cautiousness to the boy's advertisements, as she is afraid of her despotic father, but then, out of curiosity, cautiously answers Florentino's lyrical effusions that he has borrowed from his books. With the support of Escolástica, a secret correspondence develops, combined with an adventurous game of hide-and-seek, as the messages are deposited in different places. As a result, both increase into a love frenzy and promise each other marriage after two years. When Fermina is caught writing letters at school, her father ends the relationship and takes her on a “journey of oblivion” to the far-flung, rich relatives of his late wife Fermina Sánchez in the area east of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta . But Florentino researches their whereabouts via his telegraph network and maintains contact with the help of conspiratorial cousins ​​who are susceptible to forbidden love romance. He lives unaffected by a sexually seductive environment in a pure dream world, loses his sense of reality and writes poetic telegrams to the idealized lover. When Lorenzo Daza and his daughter return to Cartagena with the assumption that they have been cured of their crush, the mature, self-confident 17-year-old takes over the household. In her phantasy she continues her secret love life with her future husband, but the company with the fun-loving family has changed her isolated worldview. When Florentino approaches her at the market, she is shocked by his appearance and his pale face. She doubts the power of his poetic love letters in everyday life and realizes that she doesn't actually know him. She tells him that her love was only an illusion, gives him his letters back and ends the contact.

Kp. 3

The 28-year-old doctor Juvenal Urbino returns to Cartagena from Paris at the time of the civil war between conservatives and liberals after his father's death in cholera. With his knowledge of modern medicine, he is committed to hygienic measures in the city and meets 18-year-old Fermina as a patient of an intestinal disease. He likes her pride and asks her out on a rendezvous. She ignored his letters for a long time, defended herself against an ascension marriage desired by her father and only agreed to this connection a few years later when her visiting cousin Hildebranda Sánchez raved about Urbino's elegance and charming demeanor. She also slowly realizes that such a marriage is a unique opportunity for her and that she will soon be 21 years old, which she has set as the limit of her virginity. Around the year 1880 she made a spontaneous decision to marry and became acquainted with her husband during a year and a half trip to Europe through his sensitive approach. Fermina developed her own style in Paris and, on her return as the pregnant wife of the respected doctor, appeared self-confidently in high society, which she initially regarded as unsuitable because of her rural origins, but had to accept her leading position.

When Florentino learns of the impending wedding, he is deeply depressed and, through his uncle Léon XII Loayza, takes the telegraphic position in the distant town of Villa de Leyva, but returns immediately after arrival to the town of his beloved and tries it through forgetting a meticulously documented series of sexual affairs, beginning with the widow Nazareth.

Kp. 4

Kp. 4 tells the further professional development of Florentino and, in retrospect, the family history of his father and the development of the river shipping company. As a 27-year-old, he tried a fresh start. He wants to be rich and socially recognized and thereby prove to Fermina his ability. He asks his uncle for a job with his “Caribbean River Shipping Company”, has to start with auxiliary work, but is not discouraged and over the course of thirty years he gets to know all areas of the company. So he works his way up to management level with determination and perseverance. The memory of the young Fermina is present in everything he does, he tries to suppress it, but waits for decades for a relationship with her as a widow after Urbino's death. To bridge the gap, he writes free poetic love letters for young people in love and, as a substitute satisfaction, begins a long series of secret love affairs with partly comical-satirical, partly tragic features, for example with fifty-year-old Ausencia Santander, the lover of a captain friend of his, with the amateur poet and Civic education teacher Sara Noriege, with the beautiful Olimpia Zuleta, who is murdered with a razor by her husband after discovering her infidelity, or in the “pleasurable fever of dusk” and the “magic of a refreshing perversion” with 14-year-old student América Vicuña , a distant relative who has been entrusted to him by her parents to look after. After their separation, the girl commits suicide. In between he impregnates his maid and forces her admirer to marry her.

At this point, Fermina's marriage was solidified again after a crisis. Both of them looked happy at the many public appearances, but after the honeymoon in the old family palace "Casalduero" she felt restricted in her freedom by the traditional ideas of the mother-in-law Doña Blanca and her sisters-in-law and patronized as an unsuitable country girl. She accuses her husband of not standing up for her and of trivializing the tension. After her father is accused of illegal business and Urbino can only prevent a judicial investigation by Lorenzo Daza leaving the country and returning to Spain, she retires to her father's house during the day and meets with her friends there. Eventually, she forces her husband to choose between her and his family. They agree to go to Paris with their son Marco Aurelio for two years to stabilize their marriage, which they succeed. When the news of Doña Blanca's death arrives, they return and build a villa on the island of La Manga off the city. In the meantime the daughter Ofelia was born and the family situation seems harmonious. As a now recognized member of the upper class, she does not regret her decision at the time, she only touches the shadow of a feeling of guilt every now and then when in the company of Florentino as the Crown Prince in his uncle's company, and she thinks wistfully of them again and again unrealized and probably unrealizable dreams of youth. Disillusioned, she realizes that she has never achieved the autonomy she longed for, but has become a “luxury servant” of her husband: “She always had the feeling of living a life borrowed from her husband: as the absolute ruler over a wide realm of happiness, that of was built for him and for him alone. ”But this time is also the time of the greatest commonality between Juvenal and Fermina.

Kp. 5

Juvenal Urbino and his wife are spending their prime in the new villa. From a distance, Florentino observes the beautiful model couple of dignitaries performing representative tasks, e.g. B. at the opening of the airmail by a flight in a hot air balloon on the occasion of the turn of the century or at the inauguration of a ship. The second marital crisis, with Fermina's separation from her husband, declared as a vacation trip, through a two-year stay at the hacienda of her cousin Hildebranda near her hometown of San Juan de la Ciénaga, remains hidden from him and the city society. The reason is a love affair that lasted several months between the 58-year-old Urbino and the divorced Protestant theologian Señorita Barbara Lynch, which, however, cannot develop due to the fear of the two for her public reputation. There are only hasty sexual acts disguised as patient visits until Fermina diagnoses a rival by the smell of her husband's clothes and the affair is ended. After the repentant Juvenal persuaded his wife to return, everything seems to have been settled, but cracks remain, which also appear externally in the aging process, as is the case with Florentino, and he doubts the realization of his dream.

Kp. 6

Kp. 6 continues the 1st Kp. After Urbino's death, Florentino Ariza's hasty declaration of love seems to have ruined his chances at Fermina Daza. But he persistently pursues his goal. He tries to end his affairs and develops a new strategy. His typewriter letters, which arrive almost every day, are not reminiscent of childhood love, but rather address questions of life, love, age and death. He tries to awaken an “unreasonable hope” in her, which is supposed to free her from the prejudices of the rigid ethics of the upper class. He accompanies her year of mourning so understandingly and helpfully that Fermina begins to appreciate him even though she does not answer his letters. She detaches more and more from the past, burns clothes and objects that remind her of the misfortune, clears the house and makes it her own. Only then is she ready to receive Florentino, and a friendship develops that Fermina's son, unlike his sister, sees as helpful to the old mother. After newspaper reports, in which Urbino is once slandered to have had an affair with Fermina's best friend and, secondly, her father Lorenzo Daza is accused of illegal arms deals and financial transactions, Florentino supports the dejected friend with a letter to the editor against the public campaign and two years after her husband's death, suggests that she take a steamboat ride on the Río Magdalena to relax. It will be your honeymoon through a, instead of the hoped for tropical natural paradise with exotic animals, deforested and devastated stinking swampy landscape. Fermina and Florentino's bodies have also suffered through time, but their love is tenderly refined through their age: “It was as if they had skipped the hard ordeal of married life in order to get straight to the core of love. They lived like two old married couples who had become wise through life, beyond the traps of passion, beyond the cruel scorn of hopes and the illusions of disappointments: beyond love. Because they had experienced enough together to recognize that love was love at any time and in any place, but that it became more dense with the closeness to death. "In order to escape the" horror of real life ", Florentino leaves everyone else Passengers disembark from the steamer and hoist the yellow cholera flag so that they can travel back and forth on the Magdalenenstrom for their “whole life” undisturbed.

interpretation

The word “cólera” used in the original title “El amor en los tiempos del cólera” is translated as “Cholera” in the German title, and this refers to the successful fight against an epidemic by the doctor Juvenal Urbino, who returned from Europe, which is his reputation and justify his position among the city notables (Chapter 1). The main plot of the novel occasionally speaks of the danger of cholera, as well as of the civil war, but the protagonists are spared both. At the fairytale-like ending of the novel, the cholera flag is raised only in appearance to shield the old couple from society.

However, the Spanish word "cólera" has a second meaning: "Anger, gall, anger" or in Colombian Spanish similar to "fervor" "heat, passion". In the 4th chapter reference is made to these two meanings. Florentino's mother claimed that her son once had cholera and the narrator commented: "Of course she confused cholera with love". In the case of his intestinal disease, the similarity of the symptoms in Florentino in love has already been recognized. "Love and agony" is more likely to be the theme of the novel.

reception

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

Love in the times of cholera is considered to be one of the most important literary works of the late 20th century and, as a story of life and love in Latin America, fits seamlessly into García Márquez's late work. The magical realism , which was characteristic of a hundred years of loneliness , gives way to an imaginative and psychologically designed realism in which the history of Colombia between 1875 and 1935 (the approximate time of the novel) only plays a marginal role. Occasionally there is talk of the period of constant civil wars. In addition to Florentino's never-ending love, Fermina's marriage and aging are the two themes of the novel.

Adaptations

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reinhard Baumgart: A nice mess . Zeit-Online, May 1, 1987.
  2. ↑ s. Colombia , history, independence
  3. ↑ Reference to the world premiere of Offenbach's “Les contes d'Hoffmann” in February 1881 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.
  4. ^ Reference to the siege of the city in 1985 by General Ricardo Gaitán Obeso, who was fighting for the Liberals.
  5. ↑ Reference to Fermina's memory of aerobatics on the 100th anniversary of Simón Bolívar's death in 1930.
  6. ↑ Denis Scheck in Welt-Online, Kultur on February 14, 2019.