Finished: Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez). Very nicely written Nobel Prize winner about unrequited love that spans a lifetime...with a huge gap in the middle, lol. I would love to say I'm so in love with this story, like so many people probably are, but there was one aspect of it that bothered me too irrevocably. In any event, though, it is very beautifully written and feeling-provoking. The story is set in a coastal town of Columbia and starts with the 80 year old Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his wife of 51 years, Fermina Daza. Dr. Urbino is a highly respected member of the community, and his wife the same. Educated in Europe, Dr. Urbino came back to his Columbian town to live and helped to improve the conditions to quell the outbreaks of cholera that were rampant at the time, and which had even taken the life of his own physician father. We read about some of the ups and downs of the fifty-plus year marriage, and see how their love has lasted and been tested over the years. Then, in a very bizarre twist, Dr. Urbino falls from a ladder while trying to recover his pet parrot and dies from the fall. The devastated town mourns the doctor and Fermina Daza is in shock. However, at the gathering after the funeral, Fermina is approached by another elderly man who proclaims his love for her as he tells her he's waited for her for over fifty years and that he's never stopped loving her. End chapter.

Flash back now to the 17 year old, Florentino Ariza, only child of an unwed mother, who works at the telegraph office in the same Columbian town. One day when he delivers a message to the home of a much wealthier town patron, he catches a glimpse of his beautiful 13 year old daughter, Fermina Daza, also an only child, and motherless to boot. Florentino falls instantly in love and spends the next year writing love letters to Fermina which are secretly given to her by her aunt. Florentino is wracked with love pains. He is also not very physically attractive, is very socially awkward, and has thick glasses for his poor vision, but boy can he write a love letter! Fermina has espied the young suitor from afar, and though his clothing and looks are rather unconventional, after a year or so, she begins to write back and the two teenagers fall madly in love, even though they only catch glimpses of one another and speak only a few times over the years. Finally, Florentino asks Fermina to ask her father for permission to see her. When Fermina does this, her father refuses and then seeks Florentino out to plead with him to leave his daughter alone...explaining how he worked himself up from poor to give his daughter a better life....not to have her marry beneath herself. Florentino replies that the decision is Fermina's. Infuriated...the father takes Fermina and goes on a trip to see his in-laws for nearly two years. Thinking that he has removed Fermina from the influence of Florentino, and therefore the feelings, he has no idea that due to Florentino's telegraph job, he's been in touch with Fermina the entire time with clandestine telegrams and letters, and they have secretly betrothed themselves to each other. By the time Fermina and her father return to town, Fermina is 16 going on 17 and her father declares her the woman of the house, in charge of meals, going to market, and all those decisions. Florentino waits and waits for Fermina's ship to arrive when she says it will, but he only sees women getting off the ship. He doesn't recognize the young woman Fermina has grown into, and so he thinks she's not made it home yet. Until...two days later he catches a glimpse of her at the market! He sneaks up behind her and whispers in her ear that this is no place for the "Crowned Goddess"...his nickname for her, and she turns in surprise to see Florentino. Then...much to Florentino's utter despair, Fermina realizes in an instant that it was all a huge mistake...that she's not in love with Florentino...that it was all child's play. She waves him off, asking him never to see her again...and asking for the return of all her letters. Florentino is devastated and heartbroken, but Fermina never relents and doesn't really look back. She goes on with her life feeling only a small amount of guilt. Florentino vows to wait for Fermina forever.

Life goes on for a couple more years this way until the dashing, highly sought after, young Dr. Juvenal Urbino comes back to town. Upon making a house call one evening, he meets Fermina for the first time and is instantly smitten. He tries to court her, but she'll have none of it! She's a tough egg to crack, but she is finally worn down by seeing her father's acceptance of Dr. Urbino into their lives..and by the persistence,  yet respect for her feelings, of the young man himself. Finally, by the time she is 21, Fermina decides she has hit her personal deadline for when she wanted to be married, so she agrees to marry Juvenal. Scared to death for her honeymoon night, Dr. Urbino exhibits the patience and tenderness of a rare man as he holds her each night and whispers sweet nothings and helps her to relax and get to know him during the day and during the night, and waits until they have been together on their cruise to Europe for three nights before making love to his new bride. The experience for Fermina is much lovelier than she would have thought, but she's still not sure what love is and if she loves this man or not. However, they are happily married, for the most part, with their ups and downs and their two children. Fermina becomes the respected member of the society circles as she is called on to do many civic duties with her husband. Meanwhile, Florentino wallows away in sadness. He works his way up job-wise in his uncle's shipping company. Knowing how love sick he still is, his uncle arranges for him to have a job several hundred miles away. Florentino takes off on the long boat journey to the new job. Florentino, who is irrationally saving himself for Fermina, is still a virgin...until one night when a female passenger on the ship, grabs him in a dark hallway, pulls him into a room, rips his pants off and "impales herself on him". Florentino is suddenly introduced to the physical aspect of love and he likes it. He decides that the physical has nothing to do with the heart, so he embarks on years and years of sexual relationships, all of them secret and discreet, so Fermina will never hear of them. Of course, Fermina has forgotten all about Florentino and goes on with her life.

Florentino decides to turn down the new job and go back home, but he doesn't see Fermina again until she is in church one day and is 6 months pregnant with her first child. He is still as in love as ever and realizes he will just have to wait however long it takes for her husband to eventually die for them to be together. The story goes on and on, with lots of beautiful writing. We hear more details of Fermina and Juvenal's marriage, including the one affair that he has that nearly breaks them apart. We hear more and more details of Florentino's increasingly sordid sexual relationships that so few people know about that the entire town considers him to be the odd little man that "must like boys". The years go by and all the main characters hit their 40's, then their 50's, then their 60's, and finally, into the age we first encounter them....Fermina at 72, Juvenal at 80, and Florentino at 76.

I think the thing that makes me not really love this book is that I don't really like the character of Florentino. Everything he does is very selfish and/or obsessed...either with thoughts of Fermina or with thoughts of his own gratification. For instance, and this is the biggest case.....at about 73, Florentino is entrusted with a 13 year old distant relative's daughter as her guardian. She comes to go to private school in the town and Florentino picks her up each weekend. He is responsible for reporting back to her parents how she's doing. And...she's smart as a whip and number one in her class. However... Florentino seduces her!! In graphic language that wiped out almost three hundred pages of lovely writing for me, we see how he first reels her in. Sickly, it is described that Florentino truly loves young America Vicuna. And, of course, she falls in love with Florentino, and their physical relationship continues for nearly three years....until Dr. Urbino drops dead. Florentino quickly ends things with America and tells her he's going to be married. He just assumes that she will be okay with this, and ignores the letters from the school when America goes from first to last in her class. He completely shirks his duty as the guardian and doesn't even inform her parents. So...after a year of patiently getting to know Fermina over again, when Florentino and Fermina finally go together on a river boat cruise...Florentino receives a telegram that young America has taken her own life because she failed her final exams. He knows there is more to it than that, of course, but she leaves no note to that regard, so he is off the hook. He mourns his "love" for her for five minutes before his attention is completely refocused back on Fermina. As I said...this just rubs me irrevocably the wrong way. I felt like I had jumped for a few pages from Love in the Time of Cholera to Lolita and I did not like that at ALL. Here's the particularly offensive passage which flashes back to when he first met her:

   She was no longer the little girl, the newcomer, whom he had undressed, one article of clothing at a time, with little baby games: first these little shoes for the little baby bear, then this little chemise for the little puppy dog, next these little flowered panties for the little bunny rabbit, and a little kiss on her papa's delicious little dickey-bird.

Sigh, I just can't tell you how much that part of the book disappointed me and made me root against the eventual un-requiting of Florentino's love for Fermina rather than the realization of it. Instead, they do fall into each others arms on the boat trip and realize some all-encompassing, later years love for the ages. I just didn't buy it. I will consider Fermina's true love to be Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Rest in peace, America Vicuna.