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diggOld scribe pens letters of love in 'Memories'
Gabriel García Márquez weaves the history of a Colombian family through 100 years of turbulence
In the acclaimed epic One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez weaved the history of an extended family through 100 years of turbulence in an imaginary Colombian village. Some 35 years and many books and short stories later, the celebrated author's enthralling storytelling focuses on a single transformative year at the end of one man's life in Memories of My Melancholy Whores.
Released in paperback in November, this novella was eagerly awaited by fans of García Márquez as it was his first work of fiction in a decade when published in late 2005. If you missed it then, don't miss a chance to pick it up now, especially as another of García Márquez' celebrated novels, Love in the Time of Cholera is planned for an English-language movie debut later this year with stars Benjamin Bratt and John Leguizamo.
Memories begins as the unnamed narrator decides to celebrate his 90th birthday with "the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." What could be utterly lecherous instead takes on a surreal quality as the 14-year-old girl sleeps through that night and the many others that follow and the elderly bachelor, for the first time in his long life, falls in love. The mediocre journalist is moved to begin writing love letters in place of his regular columns for the local newspaper and arouses romanticism in his readers just as a rediscovered youthfulness awakens in him.
García Márquez, who was born in 1928 in Colombia, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 and it's clear that his stories, as well as his characters, age well.
- Angela Rabago-Mussi
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
By Gabriel García Márquez.
Translated by Edith Grossman;
128 pp. Vintage. $11.95.
