Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Gabriel Garcia-Marquez

Love is defiant. It thrives in the most adverse and unusual conditions. It is a force of nature. And sometimes, we can't help but bow down and respect its power when it starts to overwhelm and consume us.

As soon as I put down Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Memorias de mis putas tristes (Memories of My Melancholy Whores), one cannot help but feel hopeful, that no matter how long it will take, it wont matter whether you are 9 or 90, love will come and get you. His first novel in 10 years, The Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, No One Talks to the General and Love in Time of Cholera, dishes out an unforgettable, sensual, amusing and refreshingly liberating love story about a bachelor who decided to have a wild night with a young virgin on the eve of his 90th birthday. And he got more what he bargained for. As what he was accustomed to in the past, he contacts his ever reliable Madam to procure a woman for her. The 14-year old girl is beautiful, but as being tired from taking care for her younger siblings as well as in a job sewing buttons in a factory, all she she could ever do is lie naked on the bed. And sleep. And watched the bachelor, oh, he did.

Night after night, the silent courtship of the naked sleeper and the old watcher grew deeply. And for the two, unknowingly, they slid through that slippery slope of love.

While initially some readers might be expecting the 115-page book overflowing with sex. It does not. But it does overflow with the warm sensuality as expected generally from Latin American writers the likes of Allende (Eva Luna, Stories of Eva Luna), Esquivel (Like water for Chocolate) and Coelho (I have read The Alchemist, 11 Minutes and By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept). The tentativeness and the sweeping descriptions of smells, of colors, of touch, of nostalgia. It is a love that you can almost inhale.

While I feel that Memorias is a little more subdued than One Hundred Years of Solitude, the pervasive intelligent eroticism is pulsating all throughout the novel.

When the bachelor found his girl missing after the brothel closed down, we sympathize with him as he looked high and low for the missing "Delgadina"(the name he gave her). We feel his anxiety and his sadness as he finds everything connected to Delgadina and every face in the crowd, her face. We felt his righteous rage as he accused Delgadina of being unfaithful. And we sat beside him in his anguish and his pain and then his bewilderment and his new sense of hope in the realization that at 90 years old, he felt in love for the first time, and the knowledge that she too, loves him back.

When I told my friends about the story, I was most amused of course with myself rather than with their reactions. Though it certainly would be revolting in most societies, I never seem to see the pedophiliac nature of the relationship between the bachelor and the girl. I guess I was just way too blinded by the awesome power and beauty of such kind of love.

For giving me hope in love when hoping seems not be fashionable anymore, and for leaving me breathless in the process, this gem of a piece deserves 4 stars.