A parable on sex, and love, and the bed they make to lie in.

books:


	• Memories of My Melancholy Whores Gabriel Garcia Marquez Vintage, 2006 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 107 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Memories of My Melancholy Madam

The title Memories of My Melancholy Whores demands attention, but misleads. This story tries to ennoble an old letch and his needs turned love for a child turned teenager. The term 'midlife crisis' describes this book ... granted a little late in life. Don't misunderstand. The writing displays craftsmanship many writers want for themselves, although heavy on prose and sparse on dialogue. But let's not dress-up this story as something else.

The real story involves the madam and her trick. The young woman, whose real name never appears, is setting, background, and a plotting device--nothing more. The trick, called 'thwarting the protagonist's desires' which Mr. Marquez does well, displays like a peacock--obvious, loud, and gaudy in melodrama. The plot takes from the classic, forbidden love or May-December romance ... if one can call it romance.

The premise follows the chasing the girl, losing the girl, loving the girl from afar, finding the girl, girl somehow falls in love with man, happiness results plot.

Know this now.

I wanted to like this book, short as it is, but I found the message at the end lacks satisfaction needed for readers to remember. Yes, it gives hope to old men that young women can love them too. If that's your thing, buy this short book.

Fantasy needs more readers.

Wolfe

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short but highly rewarding novella

This is a very fine novella. It is spiced with Gabriel Garcia Marquez's sly humor and timeless and yet uniquely expressed wisdom. It is so well written that I found myself speeding through it, finishing it in less than 3 hours. Because of the seamless narrative flow and compelling voice of the 90 year old narrator it is easy to read this book a bit too fast. Marquez is an incredible master of the written word as this parable illustrates. Edith Grossman, the translator, is a talented woman.

I think the book had two major themes that were carefully and skillfully interwoven. The first theme is about the state of old age, the reflections one has of the past and the observations one has of the present. I was reminded of a statement my 86 year old father said recently that he 'still felt the same on the inside as he has always felt, it is just that the outside has grown old.' This is one of the themes Marquez explores. Marquez explores the nature of old age in that even though consciousness gives us the impression that we are the same as always, in fact we are burdened with memories and past relationships, many of them haunting and sad. Yet Marquez then tells us that loss of memory is in fact a gift under these circumstances. He says of memory 'it is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things, though memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of interest to us. Cicero illustrated this with the stroke of a pen: no old man forgets where he has hidden his treasure.'

Our narrator is allowed to reflect upon this aspect of himself as he watches a nude 14 year old virgin sleep in a brothel. The 90 year old narrator, an ugly journalist of little talent, is moved to have sex with a virgin on his 90 birthday. However the young girl selected by the aged Madame at the brothel sleeps soundly with his every visit, allowing him to both project upon her his fantasy and also to reflect on his life. This is where the second theme is so skillfully developed. The second theme is that there is a type of romantic love that is fully based on projection and is more about the self than the love object. It is with the self that the person loves. The 90 year old narrator has never really loved and never really had a close friend, yet at age 90 as he watches the nude 14 year old sleeping, he projects love upon her and thus experiences a level of self love he has not experienced fully before. Marquez in his wisdom lets us know that the projected romantic love that in some folks becomes obsessive love, is really much more about the self than about the other. However age and maturity are often needed to recognize this. There is uncanny energy in projected love as he states; 'the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy, love.' Our 90 year old narrator has had many sexual encounters but never love and he states; ' sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.'

Thus the encounters open up the aged narrator to such insights as; 'I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite; a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.'

The novella does not shy away from some of the moral aspects of the story for a 90 year old man falling in love with a sleeping 14 year old virgin is ripe for moral discussion. The book was banned in Iran for this very reason. The exploration is very different from Nabokov's Lolita, where the narrator is a much younger foolish man and the girl was alert and active. Marquez has one character say 'morality is a question of time' meaning that morality is as strongly influenced by experience as it is by circumstance. In fact, Marquez's statement would imply that experience is the determination of our moral sense more so that the conditions of the situation in question.

Marquez's wit is evident throughout the book with such quotes as 'scholars may know it all but they don't know everything'. I also liked 'Movies are not my genre. The obscene cult of Shirley Temple was the final straw.'

His humane wisdom also shines forth with 'jealousy knows more than truth does' and his quote from Julius Caesar that 'in the end, it is impossible not to become what others believe you are.'

Overall this is a short but highly rewarding reading experience.

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A parable on sex, and love, and the bed they make to lie in.

This book's genius is its masterful infusion with the element of surprise. The story's title suggests that we will perhaps be subjected to a nostalgic self-indulgent account of the sexual adventures of some callous testosterone-bloated man. Instead, we find a hero who is thoughtful, generous, and exquisitely sensitive and attuned to his lovers' slightest moves. Our stud-hero is cast as a journalist who finds himself a very old man. This leads us (or at least me) to expect him to present as a pedantic pseudo-intellectual scribe, who will wax philosophical about his lechery, so as to create the illusion that he remains a force to be reckoned with. Instead, the hero is revealed as a model of self-effacement, and one who is often remorseful at past behaviors toward his paid lovers, agonizing over several of these for half a century. And his philosophical insights flow in a lyrical style devoid of any pedantry.
Surprise is also delivered through Garcia-Marquez's signature blanketing of his story with symbolism, unexpected metaphors, contrasting images, and juxtaposed `opposites': In one scene we see the hero as the impulsive and brutish (then penitent, then recidivist) rapist of his housekeeper. Then, on the heels of this vignette we see our "conqueror" as timid, almost trembling, as he eyes his served-up sleeping virgin. We see prostitutes wearing garish make-up, but also pendants of the Virgin.
The key `'surprise' for me however, was in the balance of power between the sexes. The hero is painted--often with theatrical excess-- as a dominant prowling male. Yet in the majority (if not all) of his liaisons he lives in fear that at any moment he will be (or has been) snubbed or discarded by his quarry, and thus repeatedly finds himself completely at her mercy. I see this paradox (of the hunter as beholden to his prey) as a key to what was for me the book's main message: that (for men at least), success in 'passion' (defined in book as conquest and possession of prized love target(s)--regardless of the lofty vs. banal nature of attributes each considers requisite in a`prized' lover--is a powerful vehicle that can be transforming and life-altering in its potency to generate success across the broad spectrum of his life ambitions.
I'll close by adding my spin to the musing among reaviwers as to whether this is primarily a book of love, sex, or old age: it's a book about how they all interact! Of how the power of requited passion can transform a man at any age, into one who becomes as creative, inspired, and alive as man can be.

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That obscure object of imaginary desire...

Many men create fantasmical ideas of malleable women to either charge their fantasy lives or as a diversion from harsh realities. This myth of the woman perpetually "ready and willing to do anything for love" lives on in pornography, the beauty industry, and mainstream culture - not to mention in the minds of men. Alfred Hitchcock explored it in "Vertigo" as did Nabokov in "Lolita." Some years later, Gabriel García Márquez explored this same theme, with possible Hitchcockian inspiration, in "Memories of My Melancholy whores." The first person narrative, similar to some of Márquez's earlier stories as well as "Vertigo," features an old man "falling in love" with a much younger woman. But, in all cases, what the man exactly "falls" for remains somewhat ineffable. In "Melancholy Whores" an unnamed, self-deprecating, but not very self-aware ninety year old journalist, via his own obscure desires, pays the local brothel queen, Rosa Cabarcas, for "a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." The novel (or maybe more appropriate, novella) opens with a sentence seductive as young love. Rosa procures a delectable 14 year old for a price beyond the narrator's means. Nonetheless, he goes to meet the girl, who slumbers from a relaxing elixir and the abject stress of factory work. Nothing happens. Rosa persuades him back. Still nothing happens. In time, the man develops a bizarre love for the girl who never speaks nor stirs from "sleep." He doesn't even want to know her name. Instead, he calls her "Delgadina" ("Thin Maiden") after a song he remembers about an old king seducing his daughter. He buys her things but never speaks to her. Soon he's hopelessly "in love," but it remains clear that this "love" originates and is nurtured solely by his imagination. Within his narrative, the girl doesn't even seem to exist. He never suspects that the entire sequence of events may have been contrived by Rosa. Nor does he feel any pangs over exploiting an impoverished girl, whose mother remains crippled, merely to fill his life's gaps. By the middle of the book he has revealed his legacy of sexual conquests, despite the fact that he describes himself as "ugly." Not only that, he basically rapes his housemaid, Damiana, with impunity, but flees from the seductive Ximena Oritz, who presents her sumptuous body to him in the manner of a classic odalisque. He runs very far, from the altar, at least. Obscure object of desire, indeed. But as his love for his imaginary adolescent grows, his writing skills flower. He has written a newspaper column for years. Suddenly the subject turns to love. The public eats it up and fame enters the old man's life. Still, he addictively returns to the brothel to see the girl, his love, "sleeping." Though he has never held a conversation with this anonymous "Delgadina" (does he even know that's the same girl visit to visit? She flowers unexpectantly towards the book's end), by story's end he bets everything on her. Literally everything. She remains an abstract shadow even after Rosa tells him "that poor creature's head over heels in love with you." This appears very disingenuous, particularly given the wager the two just made. The old cliché "a fool and his money are soon parted" bubbles up in the subconscious. Nonetheless, the narrator does grow in the process. But at what, or at whose, cost? "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" ultimately paints a brutal picture of age, loneliness, illusion, exploitation, and self-denial - or at least lack of self-reflection. Though, on the surface, it presents itself as a blithe comedic tale of rediscovery in old age. The translation reads fluidly and quickly. Nonetheless, the multifarious questions this tiny book raises will take much more time to absorb.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

A New York Times Notable Book

On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit?he has purchased hundreds of women?he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known.

Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exquisite addition to the master?s work.

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