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    C Ville MelancholyWhores

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    Kyle Copas
    Gabriel García Márquez's latest novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores has been highly anticipated as his first in over a decade. However, the reviewer finds the short book disappointing and suggests a more fitting title could be One Hundred Pages of Solitude. The story follows an unnamed 90-year-old man who hires a 14-year-old virgin to be his companion. While he falls in love with her, he refuses to learn her real name, reflecting how she is more real in his memory than in the story. Overall, the reviewer recommends readers seek the ample pleasures found in García Márquez's earlier works rather than this one, as Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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    C Ville MelancholyWhores

    Uploaded by

    Kyle Copas
    31 views1 page
    Gabriel García Márquez's latest novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores has been highly anticipated as his first in over a decade. However, the reviewer finds the short book disappointing and suggests a more fitting title could be One Hundred Pages of Solitude. The story follows an unnamed 90-year-old man who hires a 14-year-old virgin to be his companion. While he falls in love with her, he refuses to learn her real name, reflecting how she is more real in his memory than in the story. Overall, the reviewer recommends readers seek the ample pleasures found in García Márquez's earlier works rather than this one, as Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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    C-ville-MelancholyWhores

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    Gabriel García Márquez's latest novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores has been highly anticipated as his first in over a decade. However, the reviewer finds the short book disappointing and suggests a more fitting title could be One Hundred Pages of Solitude. The story follows an unnamed 90-year-old man who hires a 14-year-old virgin to be his companion. While he falls in love with her, he refuses to learn her real name, reflecting how she is more real in his memory than in the story. Overall, the reviewer recommends readers seek the ample pleasures found in García Márquez's earlier works rather than this one, as Memories of My Melancholy Whores

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    31 views1 page

    C Ville MelancholyWhores

    Uploaded by

    Kyle Copas
    Gabriel García Márquez's latest novel Memories of My Melancholy Whores has been highly anticipated as his first in over a decade. However, the reviewer finds the short book disappointing and suggests a more fitting title could be One Hundred Pages of Solitude. The story follows an unnamed 90-year-old man who hires a 14-year-old virgin to be his companion. While he falls in love with her, he refuses to learn her real name, reflecting how she is more real in his memory than in the story. Overall, the reviewer recommends readers seek the ample pleasures found in García Márquez's earlier works rather than this one, as Memories of My Melancholy Whores

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 1

    Book Review—Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

    C-Ville Weekly, 13 December 2005


    The publication of Memories of My Melancholy Whores would be less newsworthy were it not
    Gabriel García Márquez’s first novel in more than a decade. The Columbian Nobel laureate
    recently produced a radiant memoir, Living To Tell the Tale, after a battle with lymphatic cancer,
    so readers eagerly anticipated this work’s appearance. Sadly, this slight volume has not been
    worth the wait: a more apt title might have been One Hundred Pages of Solitude.
    Memories opens in typical García Márquez fashion, with a bold statement from an unnamed
    narrator who suggests at least as much as he asserts. “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give
    myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” The proclamation’s first-person
    emphasis also discloses the self-reflexive nature of this story.
    The man in the mirror is a bachelor newspaper columnist in a coastal Columbian town, who
    describes himself unflinchingly as a “hack” as well as “ugly, shy, anachronistic.” He details his
    cloistered semi-retirement only to mark its surrender to a reignited lust on the approach of his
    tenth decade. The former roué, who had counted his paid conquests until they surpassed 500,
    returns to the city’s brothels.
    This time he arranges to indulge in a newfound fetish for the pubescent female form. Enter Rosa
    Cabarcas, an elderly madam whose high drama and epigrammatic wisdom will form the bedrock
    of future bad García Márquez parodies. She quickly fulfills his “impossible” request by
    procuring a 14-year-old whose button-making job fails to fill her family’s coffers, but a
    concoction intended only to ease the girl’s anxiety knocks her out instead, on the first night and
    all those to follow. The narrator then exchanges physical pleasures for metaphysical ones,
    obsessively contemplating her body through many darkened hours. Christening her Delgadina
    the first night after a princess who inspired paternal lust, he falls in love but refuses to learn her
    true name – which reflects how much more real she is in his memory than in the flesh or the
    story.
    García Márquez has previously written about desire undiminished by time, most persuasively in
    Love in the Time of Cholera. But Memories lacks other compelling voices like those that give
    depth, shading, and a sprawling yet intimate liveliness to his earlier works. This book’s final
    pages offer modest narrative redemptions, particularly a brief but shattering senior moment
    shared by the narrator and the fiancée he spurned a half-century before. But like the narrator,
    astonished one evening by Delgadina’s rapid growth and garish makeup, the reader may be
    “charmed by these achievements of nature but stunned by the artifice.” Whether you’re looking
    to be introduced to García Márquez or just reacquainted, crack an earlier work, any of them.
    Ample pleasures lie elsewhere, and Memories is no sleeping beauty.

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