Book Reviews

Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The title of Marquez’s latest novel, his first work of fiction in ten years, will probably raise more than a few eyebrows, especially in West Michigan. Let me say from the start this is not a book for the timid yet it is also a book of great humanity if the reader can surrender preconceived moral judgments.

The unidentified narrator upon the eve of turning ninety writes: “My ninetieth birthday is arriving. I’ll never know why, and don’t pretend to, but it was under the magical effect of that devastating evocation that I decided to call Rosa Cabarcas for help in celebrating my birthday with a libertine night.”

Rosa Cabarcas is the madam of one of the brothels our protagonist has visited on and off for most of his life. (“Whenever someone asks I always answer with the truth: whores left me no time to be married”) His “libertine night” is wild love with an adolescent virgin.

Quite a beginning for a work I place on my Healing Books list. Well, actually it is healing for the narrator and I hope for the reader. This adolescent girl of fourteen is never violated rather she is given the name Delgadina (from a favorite song about a king’s daughter, wooed by her father) and serves as a first love. The ninety year old philander comes to realize: “sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.”

This is not love in our usual way of our understanding the emotion. He never knows her name, they don’t talk and exist only laying side by side in a brothel bed. Delgadina becomes his fantasy of what love is, feels like and he transforms his life accordingly. He begins with a perceived review of time wasted, loves lost, potential underutilized (he is an undistinguished journalist). Living this fantasy of love he learns to write with wisdom and meaning. Most poignantly he comes to face his aging long denied by selfishly encasing himself in the past, often defiantly.

His “love” leads to new considerations of others, (not in a maudlin or saccrine fashion) to the point of taking in a cat, the first pet of his life. Unknown to him this birthday gift is also quite old and in his illness has to be taken to the local veterinarian shelter. Our protagonist becomes enraged when he finds they want to put his cat “down”: “I thought in a rage that they could also roast me alive in an oven filled with cats. I felt caught between two fires: I had not learned to love the cat, but neither did I have the heart to order him killed just because he was old.” Through his uncorrupted love he learns to feel his age with vitality and integrity.

While perhaps not Marquez’s best book, which is reserved in my opinion for One Hundred Years of Solitude, this is still masterful story-telling from the Nobel Prize winner of 1982.