Contemplation driven by love: Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Book Review
Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman
Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2005

Nobel-prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez returns to the literary scene with another great novel: a story about a man who decides to sleep with an adolescent virgin for his ninetieth birthday. A journalist by trade, his other preoccupation is women:

“I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay ... by the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once”.

The woman he meets at his favorite whore-house in a city somewhere in Columbia is a 14-year old beauty who works at a button-stitching factory during the day. He quickly becomes infatuated with her and makes arrangements with the Madame of the house to continue seeing her. It is his passion for her that makes him reflect upon his ninety years:

“The house rose from its ashes and I sailed on my love of Delgadina with an intensity and happiness I had never known in my former life. Thanks to her I confronted my inner self for the first time as my ninetieth year went by. I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.”

Despite the title, this is what the story is really about: contemplation driven by love. As the story unfolds, we get a glimpse into the life of an old man and the culture of Columbia. Some readers only familiar with American and Western European cultures may consider the novel downright appalling, but most readers with a global perspective (the minimum legal age of marriage for females in most Latin American countries is between 12 and 14) will appreciate Marquez’ masterful storytelling and keen insight into the human psyche that makes Memories of My Melancholy Whores a worthwhile read.