Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' is such a powerful book, and 'Love in the Time of Cholera' is so strangely, brilliantly optimistic.
The cholera had broken out at the post, and five or six men were dying daily.
It is in fact agreed that I am the plague, the cholera of the benevolent and generous men who are interested in art and that, when I show myself with my plasters, even the Emperor of the Sahara would flee.
Cholera is even more severe among populations who are immunologically naive.
It turns out that cholera is new to Haiti. It was inadvertently introduced by a group of U.N. peacekeepers stationed in central Haiti who had come from South Asia where it is endemic.
This is an industry that doesn't have the common cold... It has cholera.
May God be with me! May Heaven bless this New Year. May it be a year of fruitfulness, of peace and prosperity; may it be a year of peace and unity for all mankind; may the world be freed of cholera.
In No. 1 of this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran down it with like severity.
I read 'Love in the Time of Cholera' when I was 19, and I still think about the characters.
We're learning how infections are travelling around the world and, sadly, how cholera in Haiti was brought in by U.N. peacekeeping forces from south Asia.
