Memories of My Melancholy Whores » (~)

A chief practitioner of the "magic-realist" style, Gabriel García Márquez's influence and importance lie in his crucial role of bringing Latin-American fiction to wider audiences while pioneering it at the same time. The Colombian-born Nobel winner tells fantastical tales of romance and heroism against an historic Latin American backdrop, always infusing believability by giving his writing a journalistic cast.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is Gabriel García Márquez’s first work of fiction in ten years, written at the height of his powers, the Spanish edition of which Ilan Stavans called, “Masterful. Erotic. As hypnotizing as it is disturbing” (Los Angeles Times).

On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, our unnamed protagonist–an undistinguished journalist and lifelong bachelor–decides to give himself “the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

The virgin, whom an old madam procures for him, is splendidly young, with the silent power of a sleeping beauty. The night of love blossoms into a transforming year. It is a year in which he relives, in a rush of memories, his lifetime of (paid-for) sexual adventures and experiences a revelation that brings him to the edge of dying–not of old age, but, at long last, of uncorrupted love.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a brilliant gem by the master storyteller.

The New York Times - Terrence Rafferty

… perhaps it's natural, after 10 years of looking back, that [García Márquez] has now treated himself, and his readers, to this sprightly, perverse little fable about looking forward. Not many of the remarkable storytellers of Latin American literature's boom years are left: Borges and Cortázar are gone, and Puig and Donoso and Arenas; and earlier this year we lost the wily and passionate Guillermo Cabrera Infante, too. But Gabriel García Márquez is still around, turning on the grill, and gratefully. Although he has spent a bit less time in this world than the moonstruck narrator of his latest book, he is now old enough, at last, to feel that every new story arrives as a miracle, and to understand that as long as he writes he can keep being born again.