Memories of My Melancholy Whores is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first work of fiction in ten years, written at the height of his powers, the Spanish edition of which Ilan Stavans called, Masterful. Erotic. As hypnotizing as it is disturbing (Los Angeles Times). On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, our unnamed protagonist-an undistinguished journalist and lifelong bachelor-decides to give himself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin. The virgin, whom an old madam procures for him, is splendidly young, ...
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Memories of My Melancholy Whores is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first work of fiction in ten years, written at the height of his powers, the Spanish edition of which Ilan Stavans called, Masterful. Erotic. As hypnotizing as it is disturbing (Los Angeles Times). On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, our unnamed protagonist-an undistinguished journalist and lifelong bachelor-decides to give himself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin. The virgin, whom an old madam procures for him, is splendidly young, with the silent power of a sleeping beauty. The night of love blossoms into a transforming year. It is a year in which he relives, in a rush of memories, his lifetime of (paid-for) sexual adventures and experiences a revelation that brings him to the edge of dying-not of old age, but, at long last, of uncorrupted love. Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a brilliant gem by the master storyteller.
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Perhaps not for everyone, but a lovely story, sort of reverse "coming of age". Marquez is a fine story teller and an astute observer. I much preferred this to Solitude.
Xiomara L
Mar 31, 2011
Have not read the book...
This was a gift a send to a friend, and a have not hear anything negative about it, sorry that this review can not be very helpful.
rejoyce
Mar 25, 2008
An Unsavory Taste
Published in 2005, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is novella length, 115 pages long. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1982 Nobel Prize winner in literature, is best known for One Hundred Years of Solitude, an epic saga of the Buendia family, founders of the town called Macondo, that encompasses all of Latin American history.
This latest novel has neither the scope nor the exuberant invention of Garcia Marquez's masterpiece, but eddies along on a leisurely elegant prose, reminding me of Maria Vargas Llosa's erotic fictions. Contrary to the book's blurbs, it has less to do with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita than with fellow Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata's House of the Sleeping Beauties, which is cited in Garcia Marquez's epigraph. Like Kawabata's novel, Garcia Marquez's 90-year-old narrator, a cable editor for El Diario de la Paz, observes the somnolent form of a virginal prostitute who is fatigued from sewing buttons all day. In the process, this aging roue at the tail-ends of life awakens to the possibility of love.
Garcia Marquez has investigated the varieties of human love, even the transgressive, in earlier novels, but this novel's focus is narrow, and its object of desire is barely sentient. One can barely call the pairing "a relationship." As in Kawabata's short novel, there is a kind of fetishizing of the female body. For new readers, I would recommend instead One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera. This valedictory novel by Garcia Marquez leaves a slightly unsavory taste in the mouth.
Rubycanary
Jun 24, 2007
Gorgeous
This book is simply gorgeous. Although if you just try to describe the subject matter to someone, it may seem shocking. Garcia has a humanity and honesty in his writing that allows the story of a love affair between a man in his nineties and a young virgin.
It takes an entire lifetime for this one man to learn how to truly love. There is hope out there for all of us.
