Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“When I returned to the bedroom, refreshed and dressed, the girl was asleep on her back in the conciliatory light of dawn, lying sideways across the bed with her arms opened in a cross, absolute mistress of her virginity. God bless you, I said to her.”
The master of storytelling returns after quite a hiatus, ten years since his last novel, Of Love and Other Demons, to be exact. And what a wait it was. The author of such literary masterpieces as Chronicle of a Death Foretold, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and his critically acclaimed masterpiece Love in the Time of Cholera waited nearly a decade to enlighten the masses once again. And what did he decide to do? He decided to be Metallica. He figured he might as well pull an Aerosmith. What does that mean? It means that he went away, build up a bunch of hype for his very loyal and strong fan base and then after ten years of waiting released a flimsy (115 pages) and pricey ($20 US) piece. Piece of what is up to you.
The story of a ninety year old man who decides that the year he turned ninety he “wanted to give (himself) the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin” surely sounds like a nice love story, but is far from it. Marquez commonly talks about prostitution in his novels, which is a direct result of him growing up in Columbia in an area and time where it was a very common practice. What makes his other novels different from this is the context.
Stories of love are Marquez’s specialty. Not regular love as many people would imagine it, but wild stories of love in amazing situations where there is little chance of success. Stories that make you cheer on the inside for an underdog, who no matter how many flaws he has, has the capability and desire to love someone unconditionally. In Memories of My Melancholy Whores Marquez seems to forget just how important this is to the story line.
The absurdity of the love story between the covers is one that might have been a side note in one of his major works, but flounders given the fact that little information is given about the characters, other than the narrators love/hate relationship with whores, and the fact that his virgin sews buttons in a button factory. Character development isn’t everything in a story and it shouldn’t have to be, but even in a story about impossible and absurd love, one must feel something for the characters or the author runs the risk of alienating readers by the absurdity and insanity of characters’ actions and the outcomes of those actions.
This is not to say that this book is entirely without merit. Marquez is still an amazing author with a great talent for storytelling. He has always been labeled a writer of “magical realism”, but I think he is a writer of far from magical love in magical places, whatever that can be neatly labeled as. This is what made Love in the Time of Cholera such a tremendous novel. No matter what the characters do, good and bad, and there are plenty of both in all of his novels, you know that they are doing it for a reason. In Memories, there seems to be no reason to his rhyme it saddens me to say that for this reason alone, there is little reason to read this novel except as a footnote to his other writings.
Must Reads by Marquez;
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Love and Other Demons, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, In Evil Hour, and Love in the Time of Cholera.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Written in 1985, this will truly be the legacy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The heart-wrenching story of a poor, ugly, feeble boy named Florentino Ariza who falls madly in love with a woman far out of his league, Fermina Daza. The story follows these two characters and their separate but interconnected lives from adolescence to old age through marriages, businesses, and of course, prostitutes. Marquez successfully searches the depths of man’s soul and his strange desires in this absolutely beautiful tale of love, in whatever form we believe it to be. This is a book that should be mandatory for every human to read, and no human who ever reads it will view love the same again.