Amazon.com
"The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." So begins Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and it becomes even more unlikely as the novel unfolds. This slim volume contains the story of the sad life of an unnamed, only slightly talented Colombian journalist and teacher, never married, never in love, living in the crumbling family manse. He calls Rosa Cabarcas, madame of the city's most successful brothel, to seek her assistance. Rosa tells him his wish is impossible--and then calls right back to say that she has found the perfect girl. The protagonist says of himself: "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay ... by the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once ... My public life, on the other hand, was lacking in interest: both parents dead, a bachelor without a future, a mediocre journalist ... and a favorite of caricaturists because of my exemplary ugliness." The girl is 14 and works all day in a factory attaching buttons in order to provide for her family. Rosa gives her a combination of bromide and valerian to drink to calm her nerves, and when the prospective lover arrives, she is sound asleep. Now the story really begins. The nonagenarian is not a sex-starved adventurer; he is a tender voyeur. Throughout his 90th year, he continues to meet the girl and watch her sleep. He says, "This was something new for me. I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark, so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were ... That night I discovered the improbably pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty." Márquez's style never falters throughout this recounting of his life and his exploration of love, found at an unexpected time and place. The erstwhile lover is still capable of being surprised--and fulfilled. After an absence of ten years, it is a treat to have another parable from the master. --Valerie Ryan
|
|
 The desires of an older man ( billybdt )
A book about the desires of an older man and the reflection of is own life.
|
 Minotaur-mania: Garcia Marquez Explores the Myth of Love
Made In Hero
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.
|
 Recycled and shallow... is this really Marquez ? ( zzzombit )
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 ?
|
That obscure object of imaginary desire... ( ewomack2000 )
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.
|
short but highly rewarding novella ( cwc4 )
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.
|
|
View Larger
