Memories of My Melancholy Whores - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Love is not merely blind; it is also deaf to the susurrating ticks of the clocks of time. If it weren’t, how could a 90 year old man, a river meandering through the delta of life, ready to merge with the sea of death, find himself head-over-heels in love with a girl, who’s young enough to be his great-granddaughter? To the love purists, what this book stands for will be sacrilegious, but then love is rarely worthy of a chronicle if it is not cheeky, blasphemous, unexpected, life-altering, or all of the above.

A mediocre writer (by his own description) for a local newspaper, way beyond his expiry date, has been recklessly catering to his insatiable libido since the age of twelve, exchanging love for promiscuous pleasures and solitude for lecherous rendezvous, with countless whores. A self-effacing but forthright man, he introduces himself as “ugly, shy and anachronistic…without merit or brilliance”, who has slept with hundreds of women, “choosing [his] brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, … made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark, … imagine ourselves as better than we were.”

On his 90^th birthday, the nonagenarian newspaper columnist, in a fit of senility and sexual renascence, has a sudden craving for a romp with a virgin. He promptly rings up his confidante, Rosa Cabarcas, the owner of the brothel he regularly visits, to apprise her of his latest whim. Rosa obliges him, and hooks him up with a girl of 15 – a reticent bud that has not quite blossomed into a wild flower.

Hitherto unknown to trials and tribulations of the matters of the heart, the old man falls in a love that is partly voyeuristic, partly worshiping, partly adoring, partly pure, partly insane, partly juvenile, but wholly redefining, manifesting that love cannot be contained within the moulds of time or reason. Thus follows is a whirlwind of emotions as the writer takes a trip down the memory lane, while containing his overwhelming (and overflowing) emotions for the object of his affections – she whom he fondly calls Delgadina. He never really gets around to accomplishing the mission he originally started out, and spends night yearning to possess her like a precious stone that he admires, yet never touches, articulating them well, “I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty.”. Desperately wanting her to be unreal, he is disturbed that she is tangible and ergo, he preserves her as a picture in his head more than a live human being.

Interspersed with the lucid details of her bosom in various positions, are reminiscences of passionate adventures with nubile nymphs (who seem to endorse nakedness in all its forms), painting a picture of a spicy yet meaningless life.

Marquez takes his readers on a trip of reflections on life by an unlikely candidate for love whose heart and mind are progressing in the opposite direction to that of his body. He adheres to his successful formula of creating stories around characters who are either past their prime, or yet to step into adulthood. Having read Love in the time of Cholera, I feel that this book does not truly capture the brilliance of Marquez. The story is practically zigzagging between different emotions, and reflections with generous dose of humor and wit, shambling aimlessly towards somewhere between love and lust. I think he could have done better than this.

Nevertheless read this tantalizing narrative for it is a sheer lingual delight. Its no more than 110 pages, so you won’t invest much in terms of time either.