Memories of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel García Márquez
Knopf, 115 pp., $20
Love in the Time of Cholera‘s Florentino Ariza was willing, if not content, to wait longer than 50 years for the requital of his love. The unnamed narrator of Gabriel García Márquez’s newest work doesn’t have that time to give. At 90 years of age, he describes himself as “the end of the line, without merit or brilliance.” He is a self-proclaimed “mediocre journalist,” a bachelor who has never gone to bed with a woman he hasn’t paid, and a favored subject of caricaturists due to his “exemplary ugliness.” In short, he has nothing to show for his many years, and has decided that for his 90th birthday he will give himself a present: “a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”Though he signs up for a night of carnal abandon, he ends up with the ineluctable affliction Márquez delights in giving his characters: irrepressible, all-consuming, torturous love-with-a-capital-L. Like Ariza, this character has barriers: He doesn’t know her name, and he’s only ever seen her asleep. Lest this idea provoke thoughts of sexual deviance, you can be assured that this character is no Humbert Humbert, and if there were ever an author who could make a 76-year age difference seem immaterial, or at least not so icky, it’s Márquez.
This is his first work in over a decade, and though it weighs in at a scant 115 pages, it is a pithy, absorbing novella. It’s certainly not as affecting or memorable as his best work, but that bar’s been set pretty high.
This article appears in December 16 • 2005.