Product Description

‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself a gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin’ He has never married, never loved and never gone to bed with a woman he didn’t pay. But on finding a young girl naked and asleep on the brothel owner’s bed, a passion is ignited in his heart – and he feels, for the first time, the urgent pangs of love. Each night, exhausted by her factory work, ‘Delgadina’ sleeps peacefully whilst he watches her quietly. During these solitary early hours, his love for her deepens and he finds himself reflecting on his newly found passion and the loveless life he has led. By day, his columns in the local newspaper are read avidly by those who recognise in his outpourings the enlivening and transformative power of love. The publication of Memories of My Melancholy Whores spearheads Penguin's celebration of Márquez's 80th birthday in 2007.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #57164 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
'A velvety pleasure to read... Marquez has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humour, a love letter to the dying light.' John Updike 'Marquez describes this amorous, sometimes disturbing journey with the grace and vigour of a master storyteller' Daily Mail 'Profoundly haunting ... one of literature's great figures pushes back the years and gives us fiction of the very highest order' TLS 'There is not one stale sentence, redundant word or unfinished thought' The Times

Tatler
'Marquez describes this amorous, sometimes disturbing journey with the grace and vigour of a master storyteller'

The Times
'There is not one stale sentence, redundant word or unfinished thought'

Customer Reviews

yuk
Ug. What a nasty little book. This was my first experience of GGM and it has hardly left me gasping for more.

Perhaps I am misreading a subtle use of irony on the author's part, but this seems to be a darkly misogynistic male fantasy of the worst kind. Our protagonist is a repulsive, dirty old man, who thinks that it's ok to bugger his maid without her permission (generally known as a sex crime in the real world) and thinks that hiring a fourteen year old virgin, forced into prostitution, is a joyful way to spend his birthday. But the real darkness to the tale lies in the way that - as he only ever visits the girl as she lies sleeping - he finds he prefers her asleep and starts to panic when she begins to murmur in her dreams as he doesn't want to hear her voice. God forbid she should talk - that she should have a real personality other than the one he has carved for her. Likewise, he doesn't want to know her real name and makes one up for her. She is his silent, nameless, unconscious creation.

As I mentioned, perhaps GGM is being critical of this type of behaviour and this kind of man. But that does not come across. Quite the reverse. We are told that our protagonist is in love and that the unconscious child loves him back. This is where the tale to me is simply a dirty old man's dirty dream. The child is a prostitute, he is a 90-year-old punter, and she never meets him when awake. She DOES NOT love him.

On top of all this I would pile two more crimes. Firstly, that as another reviewer has stated, to make a romantic love story out of child prostitution seems in pretty bad taste however highly decorated you are as an author, and secondly, to get down off my high horse for a moment, the novel commits the unforgivable crime of being simply boring. I had to drag myself through it. The characters are unconvincing, there's not much of a plot and I was glad and relieved to finally reach the end. As I said at the beginning: Ug.

A short review
I was expecting a little more from Marquez, after ten years of no books from him and then this, he may be a little rusty but it is still a brilliant read.

Beautiful and poingnent tale of an old man's rebirth.
This little jewel of a novel has been my introduction to the famous South American author and, due to its brevity, will no doubt serve that purpose for others. If, as some critics have claimed, this is lightweight compared to some of his esteemed earlier novels, then I cannot wait to savour them as much as I did this. That an 80 year old author can so effortlessly turn a simple story, involving an old man and a teenage whore, into something both profoundly moving and lyrically beautiful is a testament both to the mastery of his art and indeed to the moral of the story. And that is that the human spirit and capacity for love should be crushed neither by old age nor by the shadow of death.

The jaded protaganist, a weekly newspaper coloumnist, after a lifetime of study and careful detachment from the intimacies and complications of sexual love (he only sleeps with prostitutes) has reached the point where even the physical mechanics of paid for sex are slipping beyond him. Yet on his 90th birthday, on sleeping with, and yet not touching, a beautiful, 14 year old prostitute, he begins an extraordinary love affair with her that effects possibly the most poetical rage against the dying of the light in all of modern literature.

Marquez therefore adds his distinguished name to a small band of authors, who in the last few years, have examined what it means for a man to grow old, to face inevitible decline and death, the loss of one's individual sexual powers mirroring the decline in the status of the male in general, and in particular the older male, in the modern world. Like these other authors, he also bravely explores the possibility of physical and spiritual regeneration in the sexual love for a much younger female. Each writer has addressed these themes in their own particular way. Michael Houellebecq through philosophy, J.M.Coetzee through gender politics, and here, we have it expressed through sheer, unadulterated, lyricism.