Marquez: Memories of My Melancholy Whores – Comment. (Archives)

 Disturbing.  

After many years of silence, (2006) Marquez has given us a novella that touches on many themes: reminiscences of a long life filled with sensual pleasures, artistic pursuits, and intellectual achievements, though lacking in the one aspect of life that for some, makes life worth living - love. 

 Our protagonist is a sensitive old man, living in his long dead parents' large house. He writes a weekly column for the city's newspaper on varying topics from the town's history, literary and musical reviews, and the perspectives of a scholar of ninety years of age. 
 

Never married, throughout his long life, his habits have been to visit brothels to gratify his basic physical desires. As he well knows, however, sexuality does not necessarily equate to love. 

 To celebrate his ninetieth birthday, he decides to make a request to an old Madam, and that is to supply him with a young virgin to spend during the night of this momentous event. As usual, a gentleman in every respect, he spends two hours dressing, looking immaculate, and arrives at the back entrance of the house of ill repute. 
 
He finds the young girl in the room, sleeping nude on the bed. She of course is beautiful, where, surprisingly, he chooses to simply watch her sleep. The dawn arrives and he silently leaves the room and goes out the back door. This is only the beginning, as he finds himself experiencing a feeling he has never really felt before in his ninety years. 
 
As adolescent love, true love, sometimes does, it acts as inspiration, and the old man begins to write beautiful and extraordinary love letters as part of his weekly column and becomes famous throughout the city. Readers write in from everywhere praising the old man for his insight into the ways of pure and unrequited love. 
 
This novella is in no way a sentimental journey of old age and romantic love. It is a sad treatise of a full life without real connection, however, the loneliness of those in old age who have never experienced the beauty of the spiritual in a woman. 
 
Why this writer calls this love a pure one, is that the old man and young woman never consummate their feelings, as he only watches her as she sleeps, and dreams and thinks about her when he is away from her. 
 
Memories of My Melancholy Whores is wonderfully written and translated, so lyrical and poetic. It is a lesson about the pitfalls of old age and the utter necessity that love can become part of our lives as loneliness in old age can be a terrible end to a long life. 

Beautiful and Disturbing.