A Study Guide for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535827775

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Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez

1985

Introduction

Love in the Time of Cholera (El amor en los tiempos del cólera in the original Spanish), published in 1985, was the first novel by Gabriel García Márquez to be published since he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. As abundant publicity surrounding the book's appearance in December 1985 revealed, the author was already working on a sequel to his novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold when the Nobel committee's decision was announced. With the award there came numerous public commitments obliging García Márquez to interrupt the progress of his project until January 1984, when he resumed work on the existing material. Love in the Time of Cholera was eventually completed in August 1985 and published three months ahead of schedule.

Initial critical response took the form of summary notices and reviews, the most enthusiastic of which asserted that Love in the Time of Cholera was one of the great living classics of the Spanish language. It has been called a masterpiece of sensuous prose, because of its ability to summon up the textures, sensual pleasures, tastes, and smells associated with living in a particular place at a particular time. Because of this, it has been compared to other contemporary texts such as Toni Morrison's vibrant account of Harlem life Jazz. Overblown yet controlled, García Márquez's story of life, love, and lust in a convention-bound provincial city on the Caribbean coast of Colombia displays great imaginative and narrative freedom. In addition, it has an almost novella-like discipline in its structuring of recurrent ideas.

Author Biography

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia, on 6 March 1928 to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez de Garcia. In 1940 the young García Márquez went on a scholarship to the Liceo Nacional de Zipaquira, a high school near Bogotá. Several years later he enrolled in law school at the Universidad Nacional in the capital. Political unrest closed the university in 1948, and García Márquez transferred to the Universidad de Cartagena but never graduated. Instead he became a writer for the Cartagena newspaper Universal, then later, from 1950 through 1952, for the Heraldo in Barranquilla. By 1955 he was a well-known journalist at the Espectador in Bogotá. From 1956 to