Love in the Time of Cholera

I am on to a new book, after having read The Big Moo and not yet getting my previous book by Graham Greene back. I have it back now, but for the last week I started on Love in the Time of Cholera, which is really well written. We start with two friends, one of whom has committed suicide and has a mysterious past the other is then elabourated on and we are made to know that he is an amazing person, a doctor, and incredibly well respected and well known. We are then given a peep into his marriage to Fermina Daza. Interesting about this book, in at least half or more than half of the direct references to characters, the full names are used. I wonder if it's the culture of the setting that dictates the author use this device, or whether it's truly invented for the book.

Today's excerpt comes from Love and it is about the relationship the doctor and his wife have in their old age.

Little by little she had been discovering the uncertainty of her husband's step, his mood changes, the gaps in his memory, his recent habit of sobbing while he slept, but she did not identify these as the unequivocal signs of final decay but rather as a happy return to childhood. That was why she did not treat him like a difficult old man but as a senile baby, and that deception was providential for the two of them because it put them beyond the reach of pity.

I just realized as I was typing that that this was not the quote I had planned to use. I actually wanted to include the information about their mornings, and him getting up before her. I think I'll add it later.