What is the novel Love in a Time of Cholera about?

I started it years ago but didn’t really get into it. As far as I remember, yes, it is a romance but I think the central character was an old man. Set in a South Amrican country of course and during a cholera outbreak. Don’t remember it well enough to recommend it or not but I did love his One Hundred Years of Solitude.

It’s not really a novel about a pandemic. It’s just that one of the main characters is a doctor who treats cholera, but the disease itself is not a major factor in the story. It’s primarily a love story about a man who remains in love with a woman despite the fact that she gets married and has a whole life with this doctor, but when he dies, this man, now an old man, professes his love for the same woman he fell in love with as a youth. It’s a beautiful story, but the title may be a bit misleading.

If you want a real pandemic novel, I’d suggest “The Plague” by Albert Camus.

If you want another real plague novel, The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis is a time travel novel about a historian who goes back to an English village at the time of the Black Plague. It is not a happy story by any means.

Thanks jellies! Really appreciate the responses.

Yes, I read about The Plague about Camus in a nice review last week in the Washington Post. I added it to my reading list.

Many years ago a friend gave me as a gift the book Love in the Time of Cholera.

Another good one is “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann. It’s about a man who becomes obsessed with a beautiful teenage boy while in Venice amidst a cholera outbreak.

If you want some heavy plague reading, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror is a history of 14th century Europe, centered around an influential French noble family.

Half of Europe died of the Black Plague. And yet life has to go on. There are castles and crusades and knights and damsels. There are interesting details about how the economy changes when so many drop dead. Workers could demand higher wages and people had more material goods because they got the dead folks’ stuff.

@mazingerz88 I just started re-reading The plague yesterday. It’s brilliant.