From the Nobel Prize–winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds two people’s lives together for more than half a century.
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career, he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he does so again.
With humorous sagacity and consummate craft, Gabriel García Márquez traces an exceptional half-century of unrequited love. Though it seems never to be conveniently contained, love flows through the novel in many wonderful guises—joyful, melancholy, enriching, and ever surprising.
Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) was an author, journalist, and pioneer of the Latin American boom. Among his many books are The Autumn of the Patriarch, No One Writes to the Colonel, Love in the Time of Cholera, Living to Tell the Tale, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
Edith Grossman has translated the poetry and prose of major Spanish-language authors, including Gabriel García Márquez, Alvaro Mutis, and Mayra Montero, as well as Mario Vargas Llosa.
Armando Durán has appeared in films, television, and regional theaters throughout the West Coast. For the last decade he has been a member of the resident acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In 2009 he was named by AudioFile as Best Voice in Biography and History for his narration of Che Guevara. A native Californian, he divides his time between Los Angeles and Ashland, Oregon.