30 Years of Love in the Time of Cholera

Love in the Time of Cholera appeared in English thirty years ago this month.

Two years later — owing to a crush on a pretty British girl I took classes with in Paris, or more precisely her roommate, who volunteered at the English Language Library for the Blind — I read the book onto tape there.

I suppose many blind English-speaking Parisians have heard my recounting. For all I know, they’re still using it. They don’t seem to have a web page to check on.

If you love Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you love the opening sentence to One Hundred Years of Solitude, written before he won the Nobel Prize. It contains more richness, complexity, nuance, and subtlety than most novels or poems:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Years forward and back in time, fire, ice, fatherhood, military, proximity, distance, discovery. Many essays have explored this sentence.

Fewer have explored the opening to Love in the Time of Cholera, but it contains similar multitudes.

It’s easy to see Love in the Time of Cholera as a beautiful, romantic love story, if delayed decades by circumstance to old age. That love’s not time’s fool doesn’t…