If there’s one thing I learned last year from reading Yellowface, Lolita, and Wuthering Heights, it’s that I love having a protagonist that’s easy to hate. Similarly, what I learned from Kendrick from his diss tracks towards Drake, is that I can be a bigger hater. All this to say, I really liked this book, and I really enjoyed hating on the protagonist, Florentino Ariza.
This is the first book by Gabriel García Márquez I’ve read, and it didn’t disappoint. The book tells us the story of Florentino Ariza and his obsession with Fermina Daza, his childhood “love” he never grew out of, even after getting rejected. I put love in quotes because I don’t think this is a love story at all, I view it as an obsession with love, or the idea of someone, yet not the person itself. This reminded me a lot of Wuthering Heights, since it’s a subject matter I found very interesting when reading that novel, and found it just as interesting here, especially given how many people interpret both novels to be about real love.
The story implements a non-linear narrative, we start towards the end of the story’s timeline, when Fermina’s husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino dies while trying to get one of his wife’s pets back in the house, and Florentino appears at the end of his funeral to sweep Fermina off her feet after 50+ years of pining for her. We then go back in time to when both Fermina and Florentino are children/teens and we follow mostly Florentino until we get back to where the novel began and we see them going off on a never-ending cruise for the rest of their days.
Florentino lives a very empty life, filled with meaningless flings and casual sex that he uses to try and fill the gap in his life he believes can only be filled by Fermina. He does some great mental gymnastics to justify treating other women like objects because it’s not “real” according to him, it could only be real if it’s with Fermina. The reason why I believe this is not a love story but rather a story about obsession is because both Fermina and Florentino have crushes for each other when young, but most of their communication is through written letters, they fall in love with the idea each one has of the other person. This idealization quickly shatters for Fermina after she sees Florentino in person after a long time of exchanging letters, but he doesn’t know how to take no for an answer, and his obsession simply intensifies from that point forwards.
At the end of the novel, after her very decently deceased husband’s funeral, Fermina decides to rekindle her friendship with Florentino, which he very gladly accepts, and eventually they leave to live together for the rest of their days. Fermina’s decision at the end also showcases how she’s a flawed character as well. After being so straight forward in her rejection towards Florentino in her youth to then simply going along with him when older. She’s not free of blame throughout the story either, she is constantly indecisive about what she wants in life, which results in her stringing along men. Additionally, she’s extremely proud, the main thing that caused her to reject Florentino to begin with (he was ugly and poor) and why she married Juvenal Urbino (rich doctor with high social status) despite not really loving him, these two decisions being central to the whole narrative.
I mentioned that she takes back Florentino when they’re both older, I think this is due to another one of her flaws, in old age she settled with Florentino so she won’t be alone, in a sense, I viewed Florentino as her relationship rebound, or she might have reverted back to her childish ideals of romantic illusion and figured that that was better than staying alone. I feel like this is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to Fermina and I’m sure there was a lot of other character features and flaws I missed.
There’s a lot of things I can say about this novel, I loved reading about Florentino and all his escapades, but highly disliked him as a character, which I believe to be a sign of a great writer. It’s easy to write likeable protagonists, but writing compelling anti-heroes I find is a whole different beast.
There were a few stylistic choices made by García Márquez which I quite liked: the fact that every single character is always referred to by their full names without fault. It felt like a very polite and educated person telling me this story. I also like how the prose was a little flowery (for me) but never felt like it overstayed its welcome, I think he nailed the balance between poetic descriptions and actually moving things along. The dialogue was also quite unique in that it rarely happened, and that was something I noticed pretty early in the book, but he made it work with great storytelling and prose.
I think this was a fantastic read, while it might not have changed my life, it is something I can see myself coming back to in the future, it’s the type of story that makes you think and lends itself to lots of debates, which did happen in my case as this was read for the book club I attend. Most went back and forth on their feelings for Florentino, from feeling sorry for him, to then disliking him, then pity, back to hate, so on and so forth.
Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐☆