Memories of My Melancholy Whores …a review

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, my favourite author, has to do little to create magic. The flow of his words contain the underlying currents of love, pain, lavender skies, and blue-green conch shells. He can pack it all into a simple tale.

The protagonist of this novella, which would take one about an hour to read, is an old man, who finds love at the end of his life, when he only waits for death. The action of the story takes place on or after the narrator’s 90th birthday.

This is the story of a relationship of love and sex between an ageing journalist and a working-class child, who sells her virginity to help her family. It deals with fundamental questions surrounding love… the incredulity, the impossibility, the futility.

How many boundaries do we cross before we come to love? Is love death, or death love? Books like these take on different meanings, different connotations at different points is one’s life. They are meant to be revisited, I’d say, every five years.

Quote: “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”