Memories of My Melancholy Whores

The title here is the english version of  "Memoria de mis putas tristes" (also, loosely translated as Memories of My Sad Whores)... It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things," Believed by many to be one of the world’s greatest writers, Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian-born author and journalist, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature and a pioneer of the Latin American “literature Boom.” Affectionately known as “Gabo” to millions of readers, he writed this first ‘novella’ after ten years,  "Though memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of real interest to us." As per his own words…

 

-Memories of my Melancholy Whores- begins on the eve of the 90th birthday of the narrator, a journalist and columnist for a local newspaper. Feeling close to death, his birthday present to himself, which will (initially) cost him one month's wages, is a night in the arms of a virgin prostitute, in this case a fourteen-year-old girl he christens “Delgadina”.   So, the Old man calls the 14-year-old virgin Delgadina (or the little skinny one) and he lavishes her with gifts. Delgadina becomes the Old Man's savior and avenging angel, for it is through her innocence and love that he is reborn as a writer and as a human being.  "Memoria de mis putas tristes" is Gabo (remember this unique nickname?) his most sensual ones. That these encounters he details are sometimes graphic and often times crudeless does not deflect the sheer beauty and majesty of the writing or of this novella in general.

 

He arrives at the brothel, where the girl has been drugged to calm her nerves. The narrator climbs into bed with her, and falls asleep. From here, he begins a year-long affair with a young woman that he has never spoken to, whose eyes he has never seen. He looks for her in the streets during the day, and then realizes that he would never recognize her awake or dressed. Yet, a change has come over him. Though his trysts and the lavish gifts he has bestowed upon his Sleeping Beauty have made him destitute, and he is forgetting the names of his friends, for the first time in his life, he is in love, and happier than he has ever been.

 

This beautiful, perfectly-wrought novel tells the story of an old man who has never loved anyone, never had a true friend, who has never made love to a woman that he hasn't paid. It is at once a novel about finding love at old age, after a long life ill-spent, and about coming to terms with the ghosts of one's past. What separates this novel from others that cover these well-worn themes is that it is also about the state of being old itself. We do not waste away with time, Garcia Marquez seems to be saying; time is a tool that carves away our excess, like a chisel chips away marble to reveal a work of art.

 

This short history (a novella), which I have always felt was his best form, is carefully written, each sentence an equal part of the story. There are very few excesses, and because of this, the work reads very quickly. I often, when reading, had to force myself to slow down, so that I could really concentrate on the work, and when the book started to get really good, near the middle, I had to force myself to slow down again in order to catch the tiny nuances in the text that Garcia Marquez throws at the reader. It's a page turner, but if you blink, you'll miss some great humor and irony.