Love Letters

Mona Simpson

• Love in the Time Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, translated by Edith Grossman
  Cape, 352 pp, £11.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 224 02570 8

It is hard now to recover the thrill of underground discovery, the hand-to-hand ardour, the feeling of claim engendered by A Hundred Years of Solitude. But Love in the Time of Cholera, like Autumn of the Patriarch before it, gives us something altogether new. With gorgeous, lucent writing, full of brilliant stops and starts, majestic whirls, thrilling endings, splendour and humour, the magician of our century takes on psychological realism.