Set in the late 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th, Love in the Time of Cholera traces the lives of three people—Dr Juvenal Urbino, his wife Fermina Daza, and her ardent admirer Florentino Ariza.

In some senses the novel had a lot of hurdles to overcome in order to reach me. The setting was old even when it was written in 1985 and the telephone is invented in the course of the novel. It is set in another culture, in an unidentified country in South America that the author assumes the reader knows. The text itself has been translated from Spanish. By and large, the novel manages to transcend these things and touch on issues that remain eternal. Still, there were times when I was left feeling like I wasn’t quite getting the joke or grasping all the nuances.

I found it was a novel I had to be patient with for a number of reasons. It is a meandering sort of tale, weaving in and out of the lives of the three main characters and more than a few minor characters. Nor does it tell things in a linear fashion, but doubles back on time and itself to relate all manner of extraordinary and mundane happenings. Yet despite all this, I didn’t find it confusing or hard to follow. There were a few occasional exceptions, due solely to the overuse of third person pronoun and the structure of the sentence, rather than the structure of the novel.

However, the structure of the book was also another thing that required my patience. The chapters and paragraphs are long and there is little in the way of dialogue. Nor is it a suspenseful sort of tale, but filled with the tedium of the every day.

The book certainly rewards the patient, however. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has a wonderful knack for presenting the juxtaposition of romance and high ideals of all sorts with the mud and dirt of reality. In this sense, the title really is apt. As may be assumed, it subtly asks many questions about the nature of love through its portrayals. I found its examination of the squeamishness that younger generations have about love amongst their grey-haired elders to be particularly thought-provoking. There is also a keen sense of the ridiculous—such as the widow who can’t stop talking about her dead husband whenever she is sleeping with a lover—and touches of whimsy that I enjoyed.

There was one death late in the novel that I found entirely too convenient. But all in all, the book is certainly worth the read.