A Half-Century of Solitude LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Edith Grossman; Knopf; 352 pages; $18.95

By Paul Gray

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.

This contretemps calls for a bit of explaining, and Garcia Marquez flashes backward to tell all. A half-century of solitude earlier, Florentino enjoys a passionate, three-year romance with the schoolgirl Fermina, conducted entirely through the exchange of clandestine letters. His swooning preoccupation and physical distress arouse concern: "His mother was terrified because his condition did not resemble the turmoil of love so much as the devastation of cholera." But it is love, all right, and Florentino's symptoms grow worse when Fermina abruptly tosses him aside and later weds Dr. Urbino, the scion of an illustrious though fading family.

Melodrama would be served if Fermina repented immediately and suffered married life at leisure. In fact, her husband is a good man, and she hardly has a thought to spare for Florentino and his blighted life. For his part, Florentino resolves to keep himself spiritually pure for the moment when he will, someday, possess Fermina; in the meantime, he consoles himself with the physical companionship of women in order to learn more about his beloved. He writes down his impressions and amasses "some 25 notebooks, with 622 entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the countless fleeting adventures that did ^ not even deserve a charitable note."

Will Florentino and Fermina find happiness at the long, bitter end? Garcia Marquez answers this question eventually, but the success of his novel does not depend on the outcome. The genius of Love in the Time of Cholera is the filling-in of the gaps of ordinary life, the munificence of detail that can be exacted from a place where, as Dr. Urbino muses, "nothing had happened for four centuries." Nonetheless, the torpid scenery provides a beguiling background, "the broken roofs and the decaying walls, the rubble of fortresses among the brambles, the trail of islands in the bay, the hovels of the poor around the swamps, the immense Caribbean."

History may have abandoned this backwater metropolis, once heralded as "the gateway to America," but life goes on in stunning profusion. Garcia Marquez generously populates a place "where everything was known, and where many things were known even before they happened, above all if they concerned the rich." But the constant gossip actually pays little heed to class distinctions. Whatever their status, the author's characters energetically play their parts in the human comedy. They are born to die. Hearts are enchanted, broken and sometimes put back together again. Wisdom accrues to those who have grown too old to profit by its possession. This novel is filled with surprises, but not those of the amazing variety. The constant, throbbing fascination here is the shock of recognition.