Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985)

The sleeplessness, the green pallor, the fever, the refusal of food: Florentino Ariza's lovesickness wears the exact symptoms of the cholera loose in the city's streets, and _Love in the Time of Cholera_ means that equation literally, never as ornament. Fermina Daza marries a sensible doctor instead, and Florentino settles in to wait, keeping a precise count of the years he hands to a woman who has refused him. Half a century passes in a Caribbean heat that never lifts. What makes the novel ache is its patient, almost scandalous argument that love is not the bright young thing the songs promise but a chronic condition, something carried like a fever and deepening rather than fading, so that an old man proves more gravely infected than the boy who once filled notebooks with unsent letters. When the river at last carries the two of them off together, the book keeps its title's bargain to the end: there is no cure, and it would not want one.