Fifty years, nine months, and four days is the time it takes to trace the lives of the three main characters in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera, set in an unnamed country on the coast of South America.
             This is the epic story of a woman who lived in a heat-swollen country but never becane one of its bloated survivors, keeping herself intact with her wit. Marquez tells her story with skillful humor, beginning through the everyday adventures of this woman's husband, Dr. Juvenal Urbino, art patron, professor of medicine, a leader in the fight against the cholera epidemics that ravaged the country. Her name is Fermina Daza, and she has forgotton that once she was not married, not in love with Dr. Urbino...
             Marquez takes the reader from this beginning to a past where Fermina Daza is wooed by another, Florentino Ariza. Unlike Urbinoe, he is not the most sought-after suitor of his time, but one who instead admired Fermina's every step from afar, who wrote feverishly conceived poetry, and who claimed a vow of devotion for her then. He was hatefully dismissed but renewed his vow for Fermina at Dr. Urbino's tenebrous wake, fifty years, nine months, and four days later.
             Florentino Ariza has not forgotten, waiting every year of her absense, every month of her obligation, till the very hour of his opportunity.
             And Fermina Daza starts to remember...
             As a young woman, Fermina Daza kept a lengthy and passionate correspondence with Florentino Ariza, who was socially her inferior, but was desperately in love with her. They became engaged through their letters, exchanged through hiding places and telegrams in code.
             But one day, when Fermina Daza comes close to Florentino Ariza in the market, she feels suddenly ill and tells him it was all a mistake. Instead, she marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a European-educated perfectionist, who falls in love with her on a medical visit. Their tumultuous but affectionate marriag...