Word: urbino
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...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...
...setting is an imagined "sleepy provincial capital" on the South American shores of the Caribbean, where on one Pentecost Sunday Dr. Juvenal Urbino, 81, falls to his death while trying to retrieve a pet parrot from a mango tree. This calamity sets church bells tolling and mourners swarming to the Urbino household, for the deceased physician had been one of the most honored and distinguished residents of the city. Among the visitors is Florentino Ariza, 76, president of the River Co. of the Caribbean, who approaches the bereaved widow, Fermina Daza, 72, and says, " I have waited for this opportunity...
...preoccupation and physical distress arouse concern: "His mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera." But it is love, all right, and Florentino's symptoms grow worse when Fermina abruptly tosses him aside and later weds Dr. Urbino, the scion of an illustrious though fading family...
...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...