2008 Woodie Awards
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Magical Memories
Roberts, Teresa
Issue date: 9/29/06 Section: Arts & Entertainment
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Unlike longer works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (most notably One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera), this book comes in at barely over a hundred pages -a quick read for almost anyone. And then there's that title: Memories of My Melancholy Whores.
Marquez was born in Colombia, and most of his stories are set in that country or other places in South America. He is widely credited for introducing "magical realism" through his novels and short stories, which tend to have themes of supernatural events happening in a very ordinary, everyday way. His success with this genre reached its apex when Marquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature for his body of work.
His latest novel is about a formerly promiscuous journalist who, on his 90th birthday, decides to have a dalliance with a whore. Although he hasn't had one in 40 years, he wants to treat himself to at least one more before he finally dies. His usual madame finds him a 14 year old girl to sleep with. This girl, however, is so tired from her day of working in a factory that she is fast asleep when he goes in to see her for his tryst. Our protagonist, being a kind soul, decides to let her sleep instead of waking her. He asks to see her again and again, and she sleeps through his visits all subsequent times.
Over the course of these visits, he falls in love with the girl, Delgadina. He finds this strange, as a 90-year old man, to be so smitten with a girl he barely knows, but he decides to write about her in his weekly article for the newspaper.
The only problem is he seems to be in love with her only when she is sleeping, and does not even recognize her when she was awake. I don't want to give away the ending of the book, but suffice it to say the man is happy, it seems, and ready to begin yet another decade of life.
I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it, although it was not as "magical" as his other books. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, Marquez chronicled several generations of a family plagued by ghosts, shrinking, even a child born with a pig's tail.
As in his other novels, time is very fluid in Memories, and can speed up and slow down depending on context. We see these and other Marquez themes in this book, as time speeds up at the end, and there is evidence of one ghost who supposedly writes on a mirror but these are not as extensive as in his previous works.
Marquez was writing from the heart, though, and it shows. This book seems to be even more autobiographical in nature. For instance, Marquez is an older journalist, and the new novel's protagonist is as well. Since Love in the Time of Cholera was loosely based on how his parents met, and One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the history of Colombia, and since Marquez is approaching his eighties, it must have been time for him to write the memories of himself and not just his melancholy whores.
Marquez was born in Colombia, and most of his stories are set in that country or other places in South America. He is widely credited for introducing "magical realism" through his novels and short stories, which tend to have themes of supernatural events happening in a very ordinary, everyday way. His success with this genre reached its apex when Marquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize for literature for his body of work.
His latest novel is about a formerly promiscuous journalist who, on his 90th birthday, decides to have a dalliance with a whore. Although he hasn't had one in 40 years, he wants to treat himself to at least one more before he finally dies. His usual madame finds him a 14 year old girl to sleep with. This girl, however, is so tired from her day of working in a factory that she is fast asleep when he goes in to see her for his tryst. Our protagonist, being a kind soul, decides to let her sleep instead of waking her. He asks to see her again and again, and she sleeps through his visits all subsequent times.
Over the course of these visits, he falls in love with the girl, Delgadina. He finds this strange, as a 90-year old man, to be so smitten with a girl he barely knows, but he decides to write about her in his weekly article for the newspaper.
The only problem is he seems to be in love with her only when she is sleeping, and does not even recognize her when she was awake. I don't want to give away the ending of the book, but suffice it to say the man is happy, it seems, and ready to begin yet another decade of life.
I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it, although it was not as "magical" as his other books. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, for instance, Marquez chronicled several generations of a family plagued by ghosts, shrinking, even a child born with a pig's tail.
As in his other novels, time is very fluid in Memories, and can speed up and slow down depending on context. We see these and other Marquez themes in this book, as time speeds up at the end, and there is evidence of one ghost who supposedly writes on a mirror but these are not as extensive as in his previous works.
Marquez was writing from the heart, though, and it shows. This book seems to be even more autobiographical in nature. For instance, Marquez is an older journalist, and the new novel's protagonist is as well. Since Love in the Time of Cholera was loosely based on how his parents met, and One Hundred Years of Solitude chronicles the history of Colombia, and since Marquez is approaching his eighties, it must have been time for him to write the memories of himself and not just his melancholy whores.
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