Well, no, not mine…
From the time I first read the dense and lovely Autumn of the Patriarch I have been amazed by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. More than any other writer, his work takes me to a place that is as real as my own street and as distant as another’s dreams. Reading Garcia Marquez is more than picking up a book. To read Garcia Marquez is to enter another world, a parrallel dimension in which myths and magic are as real as a South American traffic jam. The worlds he creates feel modern and yet ancient like old film reels and sepia-toned photographs depicting events that happened only yesterday.
One Hundred Years of Solitude is my favorite novel. My favorite short story is his “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.” I’ve read many of his other stories and novellas all of which created a huge mountain of expectation for his latest, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, which I finally got around to reading.
Memories is slim book, simple and elegant in language, that relates the tale of an old man who on his ninetieth birthday arranges a gift for himself: a night of wild love with a teenage virgin. Arrangements are made at the local brothel and when the night arrives he finds that the girl has been drugged to ease her nerves and as he watches her sleep, he falls in love.
Each day, Rosa Cabarcas, the madam, demands that he show up and take what he has paid for, but each night the narrator falls more deeply in love with the sleeping beauty, afraid to touch her, afraid to wake her and content to be in love for the first time in his life.
Like much of Marquez’ work, the novel has a languid, dreamlike feel that works perfectly in this tale of a romantic’s dream of love that might finally be acknowledged as real. We follow the narrator through his ninetieth year as he comes to realize that there is much life left in him, that age is but a state of mind, so long as there is love.
Memories of My Melancholy Whores does not rely heavily on the kind of carnival magic atmosphere that has characterized so much of Marquez’ magical realism style, but the magic is still there, lingering after the tents have been folded up and put away and the carnival has moved on to the next town leaving a few stragglers on the shore of some Columbian sea. It’s a work suffused with the kind of quiet magic that one might feel when falling in love for the first time in ninety years.
James Brush is a teacher and writer who lives in Austin, TX. He tries to get outside as much as possible.
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