Love in the Time of Cholera the reader is reminded repeatedly of his more sinister exploits. The novel examines romantic love in myriad forms, both "ideal" and "depraved", and continually forces the reader to question such ready-made characterizations by introducing elements antithetical to these facile judgments. García Márquez's main notion is that lovesickness is literally an illness, a disease comparable to cholera. Florentino suffers from this just as he might suffer from any malady. At one point, he conflates his physical pain with his amorous pain when he vomits after eating flowers in order to imbibe Fermina's scent. In the final chapter, the Captain's declaration of
The Time of the Angels the reader's imagination is addressed, responds and is satisfied." Also in the "New York Times", Charles Poore, while noting Murdoch's "preachy passages" and the book's "gothick novel" aspects, described her as a "born storyteller" and "The Time of the Angels" as the "newest and best" of her "excellent melodramas". In "The New York Review of Books" Denis Donoghue described the novel as "elegiac", "an anthology of defeats: magic, belief, prayer, love, and now perhaps poetry itself." "Kirkus Reviews" described the novel as a "mediocre work" partially because of her frequent novel writing, writing that the plot resembles her own earlier