From Publishers Weekly
The ironic vision and luminous evocation of South America that have distinguished Garcia Marquez's Nobel Prize-winning fiction since his landmark work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, persist in this turn-of-the-century chronicle of a unique love triangle. It is a fully mature novel in scope and perspective, flawlessly translated, as rich in ideas as in humanity. The illustrious and meticulous Dr. Juvenal Urbino and his proud, stately wife Fermina Daza, respectively past 80 and 70, are in the autumn of their solid marriage as the drama opens on the suicide of the doctor's chess partner. Jeremiah de Saint-Amour, a disabled photographer of children, chooses death over the indignities of old age, revealing in a letter a clandestine love affair, on the "fringes of a closed society's prejudices." This scenario not only heralds Urbino's demise soon afterwhen he falls out of a mango tree in an attempt to catch an escaped parrotbut brilliantly presages the novel's central themes, which are as concerned with the renewing capacity of age as with an anatomy of love. We meet Florentino Ariza, more antihero than hero, a mock Don Juan with an undertaker's demeanor, at once pathetic, grotesque and endearing, when he seizes the memorably unseemly occasion of Urbino's funeral to reiterate to Fermina the vow of love he first uttered more than 50 years before. With the fine detailing of a Victorian novel, the narrative plunges backward in time to reenact their earlier, youthful courtship of furtive letters and glances, frustrated when Fermina, in the light of awaking maturity, realizes Florentino is an adolescent obsession, and rejects him. With his uncanny ability to unearth the extraordinary in the commonplace, Garcia Marquez smoothly interweaves Fermina's and Florentino's subsequent histories. Enmeshed in a bizarre string of affairs with ill-fated widows while vicariously conducting the liaisons of others via love poems composed on request, Florentino feverishly tries to fill the void of his unrequited passion. Meanwhile, Fermina's marriage suffers vicissitudes but endures, affirming that marital love can be as much the product of art as is romantic love. When circumstances both comic and mystical offer Fermina and Florentino a second chance, during a time in their lives that is often regarded as promising only inevitable degeneration toward death, Garcia Marquez beautifully reveals true love's soil not in the convention of marriage but in the simple, timeless rituals that are its cement. 100,000 first printing; first serial to the New Yorker; BOMC main selection. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
While delivering a message to her father, Florentino Ariza spots the barely pubescent Fermina Daza and immediately falls in love. What follows is the story of a passion that extends over 50 years, as Fermina is courted solely by letter, decisively rejects her suitor when he first speaks, and then joins the urbane Dr. Juvenal Urbino, much above her station, in a marriage initially loveless but ultimately remarkable in its strength. Florentino remains faithful in his fashion; paralleling the tale of the marriage is that of his numerous liaisons, all ultimately without the depth of love he again declares at Urbino's death. In substance and style not as fantastical, as mythologizing, as the previous works, this is a compelling exploration of the myths we make of love. Highly recommended. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
?A rich, commodious novel whose narrative power is matched only by its generosity of vision.? --The New York Times

?A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy . . . humane, richly comic, almost unbearably touching and altogether extraordinary. ?Newsweek

?The greatest luxury, as in all of García Márquez?s books, is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality . . . the agelessness of the human story as told by one of this century?s most evocative writers.? --Anne Tyler, Chicago Sun-Times Book Week

?Revolutionary in daring to suggest that vows of love made under a presumption of immortality?youthful idiocy, to some?may yet be honored, much later in life when we ought to know better, in the face of the undeniable. . . . . a shining and heartbreaking book? ?Thomas Pynchon, The New York Times



Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Spanish


Language Notes
Text: English, Spanish (translation)


From the Publisher
"A love story of astonishing power and delicious comedy . . . humane, richly comic, almost unbearably touching and altogether extraordinary."
--Newsweek


From the Inside Flap
Set in a country on the Caribbean coast of South America, this is a story about a woman and two men and their entwined lives. From the author of the legendary One Hundred Years of Solitude.

ANNOTATION

The lush, wondrous story of an unrequited love that survives half a century.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds three people's lives together for more than fifty years. In the story of Florentino Ariza, who waits more than half a century to declare his undying love to the beautiful Fermina Daza, whom he lost to Dr. Juvenal Urbino so many years before, García Márquez has created a vividly absorbing fictional world, as lush and dazzling as a dream and as real and immediate as our own deepest longings. Now available for the first time in the Contemporary Classics series!

FROM THE CRITICS

Anne Tyler

One of this century's most evocative writers. —Chicago Sun-Times

Charles McGrath

This shining and heartbreaking novel may be one of the greatest love stories ever told. -- The New York Times Books of the Century

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING