It has been many years since I read Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I enjoyed the book, just as I had One Hundred Years of Solitude, perhaps even more so. There is a quality about the manner in which the writer described the transitory lives of people whose experiences mirror in large part, that of all those who preceded them and those who succeed them; unsurprisingly, since he wrote about the human condition, humanity with all its foibles, but most piercingly about the need that exists in the human soul to love and be loved.



The ephemeral quality of the prose, with its mystical,never-quite-there yet utterly believable presence, casts a spell over the reader, momentarily lifting the screen of practical literalism of our everyday world and our understanding of it, to invite speculative mysticism briefly into one's credulous literary experience.

When my husband brought home from our public library branch a DVD-film of the novel, my first instinct was to dismiss it. No film could capture those elusive qualities of human romantic emotions interplaying with so many other emotions, good and ill, and the grand sweep of its exotic setting. It would surely have been a failed mess of an attempt to transpose the novel into a screenplay. So I hardly expected much of it, when we viewed it last night.

When the film was over, we were both left with the very same impression, that it had been sensitively, humorously, intelligently and good-naturedly transposed from the written world to the world of the cinema with a good deal of success. We enjoyed the film, felt the acting was excellent, the screenplay successful, the filming gorgeously overwhelming to the senses.




The film, after its 2007 release, evidently did not receive much in the way of positive reviews by film critics who it appears, seemed quite convinced in their professional evaluation, that it failed utterly to capture the magic realism of Mr. Marquez's magnificent muse unfolding in his portrayal of a period-piece love triangle.

We beg to differ.