Word: novelizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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While Marquez does comment on the political situation of Colombia, as the novel takes place during a turbulent era in which the Liberal party pitted itself against the Conservative party in a series of civil wars, the repercussions of which led to intense violence and military rule in the 20th century. But in the novel, war, like the cholera, is ever present in the background...
...novel centers on an emotional triangle involving an immigrant's daughter, Fermina Daza, a brilliant young doctor, Juvenal Urbino, with, as Thomas Pynchon has written, Florentino Ariza serving "as the hypotenuse." Florentino becomes obsessed with Fermina, who is about 13, and he writes her passionate, though unsuccessful, love letters. In typical Latin American fashion, the young woman is chaperoned and kept at a safe distance from suitors. Fermina's aunt agrees to serve as a courier, however, and soon the two fall hoplessly in love, exchanging piles and piles of stamps, envelopes and surreptitious locks of braided hair...
Despite the fairy-tale ending of Marquez' novel, the magical realism which dominated the prose of his previous works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Autumn of the Patriarch is surprisingly subtle in this latest work. No sleeping women spout anger and green blood, no plagues of forgetfulness rain down upon forgotten towns. Furthermore, conversation with spirits is relatively nonexistent in Love in the Time of Cholera and babies with corkscrew tails are not to be found...
...presenting a novel in which love prevails during a war, Marquez is posing a new political solution. In the novel, both the war and the love exist simultaneously, and there is love in the time of cholera. But one day the cholera, and the war, must end. By saying that the love can prevail, Marquez seems highly optimistic. It is possible that he is saying Latin Americans should concentrate on the positive and the eternal in their search for political peace and that they should avoid the cholera and the unpleasantness...
...Fifth Child, Doris Lessing once again explores the political by describing the personal. This new novel focuses on how society relinquishes responsibility for outcasts and the lower classes. Lessing's story is a fairy tale with a point, and her vision of British society is stern, satiric, and bleak...