Love in the Time of Cholera, a new novel by Gabriel García Márquez, is being promoted by its American publisher as "a book that takes its place alongside the earlier, famous work, in that rarest company of the true masterpieces of modern literature." The earlier, famous work is, of course, One Hundred Years of Solitude, for which García Márquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Love in the Time of Cholera is considered by many to be García Márquez's most substantial work since his masterpiece--certainly, it is the largest--and it embodies a stylistic development, a turn away from magical realism and toward realism.
Love in the Time of Cholera appeared two years ago in Colombia and has already become a best-seller in Latin America and Europe. In the Spanish-speaking world, 1.2 million copies have been sold; 500,000 have been sold in Germany and 150,000 in Italy. The book was a best-seller in France for twenty-two weeks. Since its publication in the United States in April, García Márquez's new novel has received much attention here as well.
For THE WORLD & I, Alfred MacAdam, in "The García Márquez Phenomenon," retraces the steps that led García Márquez from Aracataca, the Colombian town where he was born in 1928, to the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude in Buenos Aires in 1967, to the Nobel prize, and from there to the appearance of Love in the Time of Cholera. Douglas Day in "The Emperor's New Clothes," and Dolores Moyano Martin, in "Old Age and Love on the River," review García Márquez's new novel, expressing quite different viewpoints. Martin also reflects on the characters' connections to García Márquez and his family. Finally, Russell Kirk in "The Impudicities of García Márquez" comments on the salaciousness
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