"Love in the Time of Cholera" (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez

What is love? According to the ancient Greeks, there are four types of love: agápe, éros, philía, and storgē. Love is uncontrollable. Love is endemic. Love is pandemic. Love evolves over time, noticeably over 51 years, 9 months and 4 days. To think "Love in the Time of Cholera" as a purely romantic novel is a singular perspective. Sure, it is heartwarming to read about two septuagenarians rekindling old flames after all those years. It is indisputable that this novel is 368 pages of cataclysmic passion, made especially potent in the translation of Edith Grossman, replete with vehement vocabularies. Reading between the lines reveals a critical survey on all levels of love and relationships - between God and men (in terms of faith, institutional behaviours and the sacrament of marriage), between parents and children (two pairs of contrasted parental relationships), abstinence, promiscuity. blind love, hopeless love, deliberated love, selfish love, self love (in the spiritual sense of self discovery and physical sense of masturbation), paedophilia, you name it. Love causes madness, invites murder, incites suicide. It is a bit like reading "Lolita", there is no moral to the story and, indeed, love itself. All talks of "happily thereafter", "New Fidelity" and "together at last" come at the price of stepping over the bodies of others, sometimes literally. Beauty to one is ugliness to the other, love is selfish after all. This novel is the perfect amalgamation of intellectualism and emotionalism. Every sentence is nuanced and breathtaking, full of humour and wit. It is so dense (in every sense of the word) that I had to digest it in two sittings over the course of a year, and I made the terrible mistake of reading Pablo Neruda's love poems in parallel that I nearly smothered myself with South American passion. It could very well be one of the best things you will ever read in your life. You will learn to love it as you learn to love.