Time for Between the Line’s Book Club April pick!  This April, we are reading Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Comment below every Friday, and/or meet us in person at the Arden Dimick Library in Sacramento, on April 25, 2015 at 10:30AM.

Love in the Time of Cholera was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel-prize winning Columbian author.  The book explores the meaning of love and romance, as well as the non-linear nature of time.  It also makes use of magical realism, a style pioneered by Marquez, although he disliked the label, saying “I simply write the way my grandmother told stories.”  In magical realism, fantastical elements are presented side by side with mundane events, usually without explanation and with highly symbolic meaning.

In an article for SFReporter, Lee Miller said the following about Marquez’s writing in general, and Love in the Time of Cholera in particular:

Select readers don’t enjoy Garcia-Marquez’s tickling… his shifting center, the big hooks, the Faulkneresque complexity of form (minus Faulkner’s incoherence), the solitude, the fateful mistakes, the love and destruction, the loyalty and betrayal, such life and death—all grand and exaggerated. Yet for most, the author brings an elite pleasure, a grand understanding of self and the world, along with laughter, lightheartedness, and a special wavelength of joy. Through “magical realism,” Garcia-Marquez expands the visible spectrum of humanity.