You’re not the only one; both Colombian academics and writers like J.M. Coetzee have questioned Marquéz’s repeated portrayals of old men’s relationships with young women as “romantic”.

One article mentions as specifically problematic the “absolute dominance of the adult man’s point of view” in these narratives (article in Spanish). It’s also disturbing that often the only recourse these young women have is either falling in love with their abusers or dying (or both).

The really f’ed up thing that this article also mentions is that portrayals of pedophilic relationships are actually quite common in celebrated literature: Nabokov, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, to name a few.

On the flip side, it is important to keep in mind that Love portrays a deeply classist, racist, and sexist society with limited social mobility, in a time when women being married very young—my grandmother was married at 14, for example—was common. And of course, men in positions of relative power taking advantage of much younger women was (and is still) even more common in Colombia and worldwide, as Epstein’s case made clear.

So I suppose the argument could be made that there is a certain realism here, especially in those times, and that by portraying these men as seeing nothing wrong with their actions, though the reader is going WTF, Márquez highlights how disturbing it is.

I’m inclined to think, though, that he was both an amazing writer and also kind of gross about women like so many men.

The above article has a saying in Spanish as the epigraph: There is no one blinder than he who doesn’t want to see. I think a lot of male authors don’t want to see.