collected
Fiction · Novel · Literary Fiction · Romance
About 7 h 15 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 15 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Florentino Ariza considers Fermina Daza the love of his life, but she ends their youthful courtship and marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino. In a Caribbean port city around the turn of the twentieth century, Urbino works to combat cholera while Florentino rises in the river-shipping business. As Fermina builds a married life, Florentino pursues hundreds of affairs while continuing to stake his future on his attachment to her.
Expansive and often comic, the narration moves back and forth through their lives in long, richly detailed paragraphs. The pace is leisurely, with descriptions and digressions taking precedence over steady plot movement. This is adult literary fiction about desire and enduring attachment, with explicit sex and sexual abuse.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Canonical
Somewhat. Long, richly detailed paragraphs and a narration that moves back and forth through the characters’ lives demand attention. The prose is ornate, lyrical and witty, with descriptions and digressions taking precedence over steady plot movement.
No. Florentino’s enduring attachment to Fermina sits alongside his hundreds of affairs and her married life with Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Love and marriage share the focus with obsession, aging, memory and mortality.
Strong sexual content, including explicit sex, and strong abuse, including sexual abuse, are present. Desire and enduring attachment are central to the adult literary story.
No. The narration is often comic, with wit alongside its melancholic, reflective and romantic tone. Its attention to desire, marriage and aging gives the comedy a wistful setting.
Take time with the descriptions and digressions, and follow the relationships as the narration moves between periods of the characters’ lives. The leisurely pace gives more space to character and ideas than to steady plot movement.
368 pages in the Vintage 2007 paperback edition.
Vintage · 2007 · Paperback. ISBN 9780307389732.
About 7 hours 15 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 368-page Vintage edition. Dense books can take longer.
Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was a Colombian writer, journalist, and Nobel laureate whose fiction joins intimate experience to the political and historical life of Latin America. He left law school for journalism and became an outspoken critic of Colombian and international politics. Across his novels and stories, family memory, solitude, desire, violence, and failures of collective responsibility recur, but his approach changes with the subject. One Hundred Years of Solitude uses an expansive family chronicle and matter-of-fact magical events to trace how Macondo remembers and distorts its history, while the spare No One Writes to the Colonel centers on an aging veteran waiting for a pension from an indifferent state. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a fragmented reconstruction of an announced murder turns conflicting testimony and missed warnings into an account of communal failure. These different forms reflect García Márquez’s view that style is determined by subject and historical moment.
