“Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel García Márquez. New York, NY: Random House, 1988.
In 1988, Gabriel García Márquez had been banned from traveling to the United States for years because of his friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Despite the travel ban, García Márquez enjoyed a great readership in the United States, particularly for his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1970).
When Bill Clinton was elected President in 1993, he had long been a great reader of Gabriel García Márquez. President Clinton lifted the travel ban and the two men met a number of times. As related in Gerald Martin’s biography of García Márquez, author William Styron invited García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes to his home to meet Clinton. Clinton and García Márquez shared a love for William Faulkner but García Márquez was certainly surprised to hear President Clinton recite passages from “The Sound and the Fury” by heart.
Gabriel García Márquez (19272014) is best known for writing in the style of magical realism, where the mundane seems magical and even the magical begins to seem ordinary. In 1982, García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his short stories and novels but he is most famous for his novels “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1970) and “Love in the Time of Cholera” (1988).
“Love in the Time of Cholera” chronicles Florentino Ariza’s pursuit of Fermina Daza over the course of fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. García Márquez ‘s parents were the inspiration for this unusual love story— Gabriel Eligio courted Luisa with endless violin serenades, love poems, and letters until her family consented to the marriage despite their objections.
At the time “Love in the Time of Cholera” was published in the United States in 1988, García Márquez could not tour in the United States because of the government travel ban, so Random House mailed the sheets to García Márquez for him to sign. The sheets were bound into a beautiful limited edition of 350 copies with pink cloth over black cloth boards with a black lace patterned acetate jacket, housed in a yellow slipcase with a black lace pattern.
Original to the Clarioin-Ledger
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