Books: A Half-Century of Solitude LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

Because of the time warp of translation, it took three years for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel Cien Anos de Soledad to reach and astound the English- speaking world as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970). That rousing chronicle of a mythical South American town and a family doomed to heroism and folly established its author's international reputation. Among the book's magical properties was the power to transform a once obscure Colombian journalist into the recipient of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. Garcia Marquez, of course, published other works along the way to Stockholm, including three novels, several collections of stories and dusted-off samples of old newspaper reporting. But none of these achieved the glitter and scope of his most triumphant narrative, which concluded, after all, with a warning that the lightning of inspiration does not strike twice: "Races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth."

Perhaps countless readers' hopes for another Solitude have been misguided. Rumors have been building, though, of something big in progress. Another long, ambitious Garcia Marquez novel has been wending its way toward English translation, accumulating impressive numbers in the process: sales of more than 1 million in the original Spanish version, hundreds of thousands of copies snapped up in West Germany, Italy and France. The U.S. debut of Love in the Time of Cholera comes preceded by considerable thunder.

The noise is justified. This book will not make anyone forget One Hundred Years of Solitude, and thank goodness for that. Instead, Garcia Marquez, 60, * offers a spacious mirror image of the novel that made him famous. This time out, surface events largely conform to the dictates of plausibility. No one ascends bodily into heaven; the famous plague of insomnia that swept through Solitude here becomes literal, recurrent ravages of cholera morbus. The bizarre and outlandish are relegated to the domain of private lives, to characters who must construct for themselves elaborate fictions to follow in order to stand the shocks and tedium of being alive.

The setting is an imagined "sleepy provincial capital" on the South American shores of the Caribbean, where on one Pentecost Sunday Dr. Juvenal Urbino, 81, falls to his death while trying to retrieve a pet parrot from a mango tree. This calamity sets church bells tolling and mourners swarming to the Urbino household, for the deceased physician had been one of the most honored and distinguished residents of the city. Among the visitors is Florentino Ariza, 76, president of the River Co. of the Caribbean, who approaches the bereaved widow, Fermina Daza, 72, and says, " I have waited for this opportunity for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love." Fermina furiously shows him the door.