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Rating:  -
Philip Roth's Everyman came to mind as I started Memories of My Melancholy Whores. However, this 90 year old protagonist never dwells on his past like Roth's Everyman did; astonishingly, despite his age, he moves forward chasing that elusive love he never had, but in the arms of an adolescent virgin.
The book has some very keen observations on old age and we're privy to the mind of an archetype we see daily but never pay too much attention to. The book dabbles in profundity and sentimentalism and oddly enough, we feel no contempt for the old man who lusts after a young girl. We almost feel sorry for him.
Some of Marquez's observations are sure to stir controversies but not once does he cheapen the proceedings. Brilliance it seems, does not diminish with age.
Rating: -
A book about the desires of an older man and the reflection of is own life.
Rating:  -
Made In Hero: The War for Soap
At first glance, this novel struck me as little more than the sly chronicle of a dirty old man striving to celebrate his ninetieth birthday by bedding a virgin. Incidentally, she would have to be a minor since no other kind of virgin exists in this fantastical kingdom of brothels. In actuality, the setting is a coastal slum of fermenting humanity-transformed, even ennobled, by the narrative. That's just classic Garcia Marquez. But I have to say that beyond the crude, almost cutesy premise, there's a good deal more to the story.
My usual strategy for reviewing a book is to mark significant phrases with sticky tabs. That not only saves me from having to hunt for those sentences later, when I will want to quote them, but it also begins to shape a theme on which to base my comments. The technique usually works, except that for this book, I found myself tabbing every other page. It dawned on me that unless I was planning to write a review longer than the 115 pages of the novel, the tabs weren't very useful at all.
And yet, I wondered if it were really possible to condense to a few hundred words-almost a pinhead-one of the most vast and essential of human preoccupations-that thing we have called so many names, all of which distill down to love. Gabriel Garcia Marquez does this masterfully-and with moments so marvelous and simple they edge toward the sublime. It's uncanny how much this novel reminds me of Pablo Picasso.
Picasso did a series of etchings of the Minotaur-that mythic freak born with the body of a man and the head of a bull. Imprisoned in a labyrinth, the minotaur is fed a steady diet of virgins until the doomed day when he is slain by a boy who might easily have become his lunch. Now here is where the minotaur gets tricky: in spite of his propensity to rape and pillage, it's hard to hate him. After all, he's a beast who can't help himself. Classically, the minotaur is both aggressor and victim. As the vulnerable brute, he's the perfect symbol of man's own dual nature. He had special significance to Picasso, whose art famously explored the themes of sexuality, violence, and war. One of Picasso's most provocative prints features the minotaur kneeling over a sleeping girl. He studies her, longingly, perhaps leeringly-and with intentions we can only guess.
In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Garcia Marquez has translated the theme from picture to words. He simply substitutes the minotaur with his human counterpart, in this case, an elderly intellectual who describes himself as "ugly, shy, and anachronistic"-qualities that make him an unlikely macho, for sure. And yet, he has a mysterious appeal to women, having been abducted at age ten by a brothel madame (who happens to look like a pirate) and sexually initiated by force. The result both grants and dooms him to a life of relentless sexual indulgence, with a minotaur-esque appetite, at that. In spite of a close call with a local society type, he has fatefully avoided marriage. Thus, on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, the dirty old man struggles against aching bones, a pining for all the loves that were and might have been, and the encroaching sorrow of loneliness.
His solution is the salacious birthday bash. To make it happen, he solicits the help of a notorious madame who is almost as old as he is. Though he is a nearly destitute pensioner, and the madame a brutal bargainer, they manage to strike a deal that sets him up with a thirteen-year-old girl who additionally labors at a button factory by day. After a lengthy grooming ritual (he takes as long to dress as the bishop), the old man arrives at the rendezvous only to find the girl exhausted and sleeping. He can't bring himself to wake her, so decides to be content simply watching her sleep. At sunrise, as the man gingerly places his money on the pillow to pay for sex that never happened, the gesture is nothing less than a sad offering to a goddess. Among other insights, this experience, repeated night after night, leads the old bachelor to conclude that unrequited, unrealized love is the true force that rules the world. Memories of My Melancholy Whores is as profound a statement of love as we are likely to come by-especially disguised in such a little book.
Rating:  -
The protagonist of this book mentions a Latin quote: "No old man forgets where he has hidden his treasure" Well....in this case it seems that Marquez has forgotten exactly that: the place where he has hidden his superb skills as a narrator of fascinating, magic realistic stories.
The novel is a shallow, disappointing story about a 90 years old bachelor and his love for a teenage virgin he likes to watch while she sleeps. The magic atmosphere of the small South American city which is Marquez forte in other novels feels like a strained recycled background to an unsatisfying story.
Is it possible that like Salvador Dali at old age allowing young painters to imitate his style, this book was written by a ghost writer while the old master nods his head slowly in the heat of an afternoon siesta in Macombo ?
Rating: -
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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