Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 

Love in the Time of Cholera

Translated by Edith Grossman

Love in the Time of Cholera is yet another plague story. But this one likens obsessive unrequited love to an outbreak of cholera. While written in a crisp and precise style, the story’s strange and sluggish tone suggests the muggy climate of the Caribbean city in which it is set (“the marshes … oppressive weight, their ominous silence, their suffocating gases”) as well as the novel’s ambiguous resolution, which could be interpreted as either a morass of wrong turns and questionable decisions or a retreat into paradise.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude

Translated by Gregory Rabassa

This allegorical novel, translated from the Spanish, is about one hundred years in the life of a multi-generational family. Infused with the magical real, fantastical events transpire in the fictional town of Macondo, which is not located in a specific place or time yet is supremely relevant to Latin American, and specifically Columbian, history.