Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Vintage International)

I am new to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work, but having read and enjoyed "Love in the Time of Cholera", I wanted more. My family is Colombian, and the way Marquez describes the scenery and everything around the main character, I can actually picture it, as well as understand the cultural nuances. This story is a nameless older man, who having never married, decides to spend his ninetieth birthday with a virgin. Instead of enjoying the carnal pleasure, he finds her asleep, and is enamored of how young and beautiful she is. He begins to make a habit of going to the brothel just to watch her sleep. As time passes, he comes to fall in love with this girl that he's never met, but has only watched sleep. His curmudgeon ways change, and he comes to love life, and realize what a better place the world is when you have love. A great read.

Márquez is a member of the upper echelon of serious writers; have you read many books better than 100 Years of Solitude? Nonetheless, sometimes you may not be up for a 200 character, 10 generation epic. No? This 115 page gem is like the Splenda version of Márquez, all the flavor, easier to handle. On the eve of his 90th birthday, a lifelong bachelor, utterly alone in the decaying house of his long dead parents, connected to the world only by the Sunday column he is still allowed to write for the local newspaper, feels the strong need for one more adventure; a wild night with a young virgin. After some trouble, it is arranged but presented with the peaceful sleep of the girl that has been carefully selected for him, he merely watches her and thus begins to grow the love that in his 90 years he has never known. Though his meager finances can barely afford it, the need to see her grows, as does his love for her, exponentially. Like a teenager in love for the first time, he can't sleep, loses weight, can only think of their next meeting when he'll be able so see her sleep, her body providing answers to the questions he thinks but doesn't vocalize. This impossible, but vital love affair sustains him for another year and through it the twists and turns of love makes him see what he never did; at the age of 90 he becomes a new man, love opening his eyes before they close forever. Some quotes: "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay, and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was twenty I began to keep a record listing name, age, place and a brief notation on the circumstances and style of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once. I stopped making the list when my body no longer allowed me to have so many and I could keep track of them without paper. I had my own ethics. I never took part in orgies or in public encounters, and I did not share secrets or recount an adventure of the body or the soul, because from the time I was young I realized that none goes unpunished." "The secretaries presented me with three pairs of silk undershorts printed with kisses, and a card in which they offered to remove them for me. It occurred to me that among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission." "For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall, day or night, I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth, because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone, and I'd never had anyone to do that for." "The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it."

I truly enjoyed Gabriel Garcia Marquez's MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES, but I'm still undecided if my affinity is due to the merit of his work, or simply a reaction to the anticipation of waiting so long for his next work to be published. That the subject matter will be criticized is certain. Can love be bought and paid for? Can a ninety-year old man still love, especially a young girl, both physically and emotionally? What is love? I have found that in all of Marquez's work, the concept of love, and its multi-faceted aspect, where what is right for one may not be right for another, is always a primary occupation. The trueness of selling all for love, hawking what one previously valued highly, whether the love is pure or illicit, is that condition we quaintly call "fallen," and Marquez captures this emotion perfectly. The character of Delgadina seems intentionally under-developed in contrast to say, Nabokov's Lolita, or even Dostoyevsky's unnamed prostitute in NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND where we are not supposed to approve of the relationship because it is pitiable. Here, Marquez's descriptions of the nubile virgin leave her detached and sanctified, and even though his paramour is tainted, and strange, it is not repulsive, because he is no longer a consumer as he was previously: "...ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark so we could imagine ourselves better than we were." Prude, feminist, or otherwise, it is easy to disapprove of prostitution, but Marquez does romanticize the objectification of sex through his always-beautiful prose. That is his irony; breaking up paradigms. The ninety-year old narrator leaves his paid for companion without consummating the bargain, yet completely satisfied, and observes: "The house, like all brothels at dawn, was the closest thing to paradise."

It is unlikely that, having written the greatest novels, fough a life time for a better world, earned admiration of the whole world, and pondered on it for 25 years and finally written it near 80 as his last work, Gabo was telling a story of an creepy old man whoring since 12 and preying on a 14-year old virgin on his 90th birthday. I could not find anyone saying so, but after reading his biography by Gerald Martin and "Live to tell the tale" and reading this novel twice in a row (one usual and one slow), I come to the conviction that Gabo was having fun with himself and with the world: the whores are metaphor of all the life's conquests, each giving moment's thrill and leaving nothing to hold onto, and to feel alive till the end one better leaves some dreams unfulfilled, like keeping the virgin intact but reachable. All those whoring and mounting a servant without consent are quite tough to swallow for ordinary readers, especially people outside Caribbean culture, but Gabo was just doing his magic realism, along with the dying cat, the demented old lover, long-died mother appearing on his bed, etc. The newspaper work, the city (Barranquilla where Gabo worked as a journalist), the few people, the cat, the reading and music, the chance meeting with old lovers, the treaty of Neerlandia ... all bringing forth a vivid, layered society of good and evil and love so natural and relatable. I believe this is a wise old man contemplating the end, having no care how the world see him, examining the complicated emotions of disillusions about a life lived and slipping away, wanting to have some dreams to hold on to, and also unashamedly expressing his love for the downtrodden, the whores who have given him joys through his life. Wonder if anyone in the whole world share my view...

I recently read the author's acclaimed work "Love in the Time of Cholera" and enjoyed it very much. It spurred me to seek out more work by Marquez, hence this and several others that I recently purchased. My second foray into Marquez was "One Hundred Years of Solitude". I was very disappointed in that novel and concerned that I'd perhaps already seen the best he had to offer. Luckily, I followed up with "Love and Other Demons", finding it to be well worth the effort. This very short work (it has the page length of a novella, but is in reality little more than a short story, easily read in under two hours) has as its subject, a 90 year old journalist, who has decided to reward himself with a fourteen year old virgin. Upon encountering the young girl asleep, he is so overcome with her innocence that the remainder of his life is consumed with a love that is never consummated. The book is full of recollections and remembrances of his life and many of the women he has encountered. Marquez's writing is certainly unique in its earthiness. He deals with such subjects as sex, bodily functions and graphic illness as if they are parts of everyday life ... because they are. It is refreshing. Marquez is also known as one of the leading practitioners of the literary device of "magical realism" in which events are introduced into the story which are quite fantastic. This was a major device used in One Hundred Years of Solitude and perhaps contributed to my dissatisfaction with that work. The device is happily absent in this work. The author's writing is indisputably beautiful and at times mesmerizing. Much like LitToC, this is a haunting and compelling story, filled with sadness and regret. It is very short, however, and not up to the standards of much of the author's previous work.

In the US, we understand sexy but we struggle with the erotic. We read the body like we read the newspaper, by habit; with a glance. Our real failure in love is our failure to take our time. It's not in our nature to wait, to sample, to savor. We rush into love as if we were late to an appointment. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES doesn't rush. The book is a seduction and moves at that quiet lazy confident pace. The protagonist turns 90 and, mindful of his mortality, wants what he's never had: "A night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." Of course, desire is a dream and dreams are an attempt to remember. And, what do we want to remember, everything, everyone we've ever loved. Memory, though, is an admission of loss. Desire is our straegy to reclaim what was lost. Of course, memory is a trickster...and that's part of the joy of this book, as the "Professor," defies death less through contact with flesh, than though memory and desire. In this book as in life, it is the approach, it is anticipation, that sets us on fire.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favorite authors. Every one of his books (some of which are more like novellas) are literary masterpieces to my mind. Each book is lovely, funny, tragic, sad, joyous... human to a fault. Highly recommend.

Using just a short number of words, Garcia Marques creates a totally tactile and virtually perfect text. The protagonist is 90 (ninety) years old. He falls in love with a virgin prostitute. In his love experience during that one year, he projects all his love experiences; of an entire life on his new lover. His paramour/puta is a virgin when he meets her. And what he really experiences with her is not sex, but just the remembrance of the female human body. He sleeps with her very often, but never has sex with her. He only observes the least little details of a living human being, a lady human being sleeping beside him. In this short book, Marquez leaves us with some unique life philosophy. Perhaps there is none better example than : "Make no mistake, peaceful madmen are ahead of the future." The quote is so all encompassing and so fully inclusive as well as explanatory. The book is beautifully written and brings the tactility of life right to the readers mind. It is highly recommended for all readers of great literature.

No, the challenge is not to follow in the steps of the protagonist but rather it is not to come to a place where his choices are all that is left. Marquez writes in such a lyrical and musical manner it was hard to put this book down. A beautiful read despite the challenging nature of the relationship at its heart.

A brilliant book

On the eve of his 90th birthday , a not very likeable bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. The girl who is procured for him is enchanting but exhausted from working all day in a factory + caring for her siblings , she can do little but sleep . What follows is a cross between Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground + Nabokov's Lolita. Detached from the sordid reality of prostitution , Memories Of My Melancholy Whores is dream-like and surreal . Short + succinct , it glitters like a clear gem .

Although it lacks the magic-realism of his other novels, ...Melancholy Whores still displays Marquez' narrative brilliance. It's a short read, but it's well-worth the effort.

Sometimes it is like reading poetry.