12 - A prospective post-script : apropos of Love in the Times of Cholera

Summary

Love in the Times of Cholera is the first novel by García Márquez to be published since the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in October 1982. As abundant publicity surrounding the book's appearance in December 1985 revealed, the author was already working on a sequel to Chronicle of a Death Foretold(1981) when the Nobel committee's decision was announced; with the award there came numerous public commitments which obliged García Márquez to interrupt the progress of his project until January 1984, when he resumed work on the existing material. Love in the Times of Cholera was eventually completed in August 1985 and published three months ahead of schedule in a first edition of 1,200,000 copies for distribution in Spanish America and a further 250,000 reserved for the Spanish market.

Initial critical response has taken the form of summary notices and reviews, the most enthusiastic of which asserts that Love in the Times of Cholera is ‘one of the great living classics of the Spanish language’. It is not my intention to debate that claim here. In the absence of any properly established critical guidelines, my role will be restricted to providing a brief description of the essential features of Love in the Times of Cholera and to indicating possible avenues of approach which readers may decide to explore at greater length in the future.