I finished Love in the Time of Cholera last weekend. My only other experience of Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the lovely short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings . Perhaps I should have read one of his pre-Nobel novels instead, because, right now, I’m having a very hard time liking this book. Mind, this is a very subjective opinion. I may be confusing dislike of the characters with dislike of the book, since when I step back and try to be objective, I find I don’t have any complaints about Marquez’s writing style, even in translation. It’s fluid, it has lots of rich detail and original metaphors, it pulls the reader along. I just don’t like the world it’s pulling me into – a place where everyone, both men and women, seem so caught up in social trappings that from birth to death they never experience one moment of pure unadulterated freedom of choice. Conversely, they’re free to act in all sorts of despicable, morally deprived ways (adultery, hate mail, thieving, etc.), yet they don’