Books & Authors

This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in 

Love in the Time of Cholera with a note of reference.

They saw All Quiet on the Western Front, a film based on a book that had been popular the year before and that Dr. Urbino had read, his heart devastated by the barbarism of war.

She consoled herself with color illustrations from Linnaeus's Natural History, which she framed and hung on the drawing room walls...

That afternoon Dr. Urbino had two books by his hand: Man, the Unknown by Alexis Carrel and The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe; the pages of the second book were still uncut, and he asked Digna Pardo, the cook, to bring him the marble paper cutter he had left in the bedroom.

Even during his adolescence he had devoured, in order of their appearance, all the volumes of the Popular Library that Transito Ariza bought from the bargain booksellers at the Arcade of the Scribes, where one could find everything from Homer to the least meritorious of the local poets.

They could not tolerate the young newcomer's tasting a patient's urine to determine a presence of sugar, quoting Charcot and Trousseau as if they were his roommates, issuing severe warnings in class about the mortal risks of vaccines while maintaining a suspicious faith in the recent invention of suppositories.

“Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch′entrate [Abandon hope, all ye who enter]”

He had a subscription to Le Figaro, so he would not lose touch with reality, and another to the Revue des Deux Mondes, so that he would not lose touch its poetry.

He had arranged with his bookseller in Paris or receive works by the most widely read authors, among them Anatole France and Pierre Loti, and by those he liked best, including Remy de Gourmont and Paul Bourget, but under no circumstances anything by Emile Zola, whom he found intolerable despite his valiant intervention in the Dreyfus affair.

Pierre Loti

Remy de Gourmont

  Paul Bourget   

Emile Zola

They also brought back three indelible memories: the unprecedented opening of The Tales of Hoffman in Paris, the terrifying blaze that destroyed almost all the gondolas off St. Mark's Square in Venice, which they witnessed with grieving hearts from the window of their hotel, and the fleeting glimpse of Oscar Wilde during the first snowfall in January. 

It was the memory of Victor Hugo, who enjoyed impassioned fame here that had nothing to do with his books, because someone said that he had said, although no one actually heard him say it, that our Constitution was meant for a nation not of men but of angels.

She was unguarded, she engaged in conversation with grace and laughter that exploded like fireworks, and her beauty was more radiant under the enormous teardrop chandeliers: once again, Alice had gone through the looking glass.

He was immersed in L'Ile des pingouins, the novel that everyone was reading n those days, and he answered without surfacing: "Oui."

Florentino Ariza had not been impressed in any special way by the invention of moving pictures, Leona Casiani took him, unremitting to the spectacular opening of Cabiria, whose reputation was based on the dialogues written by the poet Gabriele D'Annuzio.





... that year marked the founding of Justice, an evening newspaper whose sole purpose was to attack the families with long last names, inherited and unencumbered names, which was the publisher's revenge because his sons had not been admitted to the Social Club.

President Aquileo Parra and one Joseph T.K. Korzeniowski, a native of Poland and a member of the merchant ship Saint Antoine, sailing under the French flag, who had spent several months here trying to conclude a complicated arms deal. Koreniowski, who later became famous as Joseph Conrad, made contact somehow with Lorenzo Daza, who bought the shipment of arms on behalf of the government, with his credentials and his receipts in order and the purchase price in gold.