Books like Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera

Unlike typical romance novels and the cliche love plots Marquez creates an original and equally intriguing tale of love; exploring the more taboo side of realistic love. His lovers, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza, are not star-crossed lovers all though fate does tempt them as such causing their love to flourish only to be halted by another obstacle-- themselves taking part in the delay of their love. "It was the year they fell into devastating love. Neither one could do anything except think about the other, dream about the other, and wait for letters with the same impatience they felt when they answered them," (Marquez 68). When associating with the concept of love one identifies it with perfection, with everything that works well between two people/character's, this is especially true for a reader. What makes this Love stand above the rest is that it began without either of them having met and flourished without either of them ever having spoken; when you think about it it is very odd, while reading their relationship teeters between an obsession and a love worth envying and is not far off from that of any real life love. Their two perspectives of the fifty-one years their love took to be established are so perfectly in line that the parts of their lives that had the least to do with one another still had everything to do with the other. "She was married forever after at the main alter of the Cathedral, with a Mass at which three bishops officiated, at eleven o'clock in the morning on the day of the Holy Trinity, and without a single charitable thought for Florentino Ariza, who at that hour was delirious with fever, dying because of her, lying without shelter on a boat that was not to carry him to forgetting," (Marquez 155).Coming back to the idea where everything connects in a cause and effect chain and even the concept of fate and destiny Marquez effectively integrates these underlying lessons surpassing the generic cliche of " you can't fight fate" and bringing everything full circle when the lovers meet repeatedly only to have their love silently flourish in the eyes of the reader even when their actions mean for the exact opposite.The most ironic aspect of the novel being that the two lovers initially remained pure for one another until Fermina's marriage in their late twenties, where Fermina obviously consummated her marriage with Dr. Urbino and Florentino with a woman on the boat that he was temporarily infatuated with. Now I say this is the most ironic aspect of the novel, and not the obvious Fermina called their love an illusion only to end up with Florentino fifty years later, because in Florentino's old age he proclaims to Fermina that he remained pure for her and regardless that Fermina knew that this was false she just laughed. Again this is ironic because it reflects on the association that humans make between love and perfection when in actuality Marquez capture love flourishing in the most imperfect ways.