Love in the Time of Cholera - post II

Today has been a real challenge on the reading front. It is cold and wet and my boiler has broken so I’m trying to read and compete with my wife for space by the electric heater and inevitably I lost.

Still what makes the few pages you do get through so rewarding is that the story continues to surprise you and keep you with it.

Bullet points between pages 72 – 130

* The story goes back to relate the love story between Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza and after he asks for her hand in marriage things start to develop at a slow pace until she is discovered writing love letters to him and expelled from school

* To try and get her to forget her father takes her away for a year and half but because he had telegrammed all the relatives they were going to stay with Florentino is able to send messages via telegram offices on her route

* Her love for him remains intact and she returns home and they meet as he follows her around the market and as she sees him she is full of horror and cannot understand why she fell for some one like him and calls the marriage and the relationship off

* The narrative then shifts focus to concentrate on Doctor Juvenal Urbino and explains that he is so keen to stop cholera because the disease keeps breaking out in the Caribbean and ravaging the local community and his father was a victim of the last major outbreak

* After being sent to check on Fermina, who is suspected of having cholera, he falls in love with her and because the father approves of the match he is given the sort of access and parental support that was never on offer to Florentino who the father once threatened to shoot

* She resists the growing pressure to start a formal courtship with the doctor and her cousin comes who feels that it is tragic she broke off with Florentino and reopens a dialogue with him at the Telegraph office

Tomorrow should brings more twists and turns…