Word: urbino
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bearded and bespectacled professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, fulfilled exactly that daydream eight years ago, when he concocted his mega-macro-medieval-mystery hit The Name of the Rose. He wrote part of the best seller in a 50-room country retreat near Urbino that he bought and restored himself and where he spends his leisure hours expanding his 40,000-volume collection of antique books and playing the recorder in his bathroom (because the acoustics are best there...
...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...
Fermina meanwhile marries Juvenal Urbino, a famous doctor who, having studied medicine in Paris, tries to reform the health standards of the city, which is presumed to be Cartagena or Barranquilla--on the Colombian Caribbean coast. Their match, while longlasting, is hardly ideal, and Marquez writes that "the problem with public life is overcoming terror; the problem with marriage is overcoming boredom...
...broken triangle repairs itself upon the death of Urbino, who comes to his demise while chasing his parrot from a tropical tree. At the funeral, Florentino arrives to declare his undying love for the widow, and he and Fermina resume their relationship of a half century before, celebrating their union with a riverboat journey. The president of the riverboat company, Florentino has the boat's captain take advantage of the ever-present cholera epidemic to hoist the yellow flag of quarantine so that the lovers never have to disembark and can celebrate their love "forever...
...answers this question eventually, but the success of his novel does not depend on the outcome. The genius of Love in the Time of Cholera is the filling-in of the gaps of ordinary life, the munificence of detail that can be exacted from a place where, as Dr. Urbino muses, "nothing had happened for four centuries." Nonetheless, the torpid scenery provides a beguiling background, "the broken roofs and the decaying walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles, the trail of islands in the bay, the hovels of the poor around the swamps, the immense Caribbean...