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| Memories of My Melancholy Whores | 
 enlarge | Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £2.10
You Save: £5.89 (74%)
New (28) from £2.10
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 69894
Media: Paperback
Pages: 128
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.4
ISBN: 0141028734
EAN: 9780141028736
ASIN: 0141028734
Publication Date: August 2, 2007
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 yuk September 26, 2008
Ug. What a nasty little book. This was my first experience of GGM and it has hardly left me gasping for more.
Perhaps I am misreading a subtle use of irony on the author's part, but this seems to be a darkly misogynistic male fantasy of the worst kind. Our protagonist is a repulsive, dirty old man, who thinks that it's ok to bugger his maid without her permission (generally known as a sex crime in the real world) and thinks that hiring a fourteen year old virgin, forced into prostitution, is a joyful way to spend his birthday. But the real darkness to the tale lies in the way that - as he only ever visits the girl as she lies sleeping - he finds he prefers her asleep and starts to panic when she begins to murmur in her dreams as he doesn't want to hear her voice. God forbid she should talk - that she should have a real personality other than the one he has carved for her. Likewise, he doesn't want to know her real name and makes one up for her. She is his silent, nameless, unconscious creation.
As I mentioned, perhaps GGM is being critical of this type of behaviour and this kind of man. But that does not come across. Quite the reverse. We are told that our protagonist is in love and that the unconscious child loves him back. This is where the tale to me is simply a dirty old man's dirty dream. The child is a prostitute, he is a 90-year-old punter, and she never meets him when awake. She DOES NOT love him.
On top of all this I would pile two more crimes. Firstly, that as another reviewer has stated, to make a romantic love story out of child prostitution seems in pretty bad taste however highly decorated you are as an author, and secondly, to get down off my high horse for a moment, the novel commits the unforgivable crime of being simply boring. I had to drag myself through it. The characters are unconvincing, there's not much of a plot and I was glad and relieved to finally reach the end. As I said at the beginning: Ug.
 A short review September 16, 2008
I was expecting a little more from Marquez, after ten years of no books from him and then this, he may be a little rusty but it is still a brilliant read.
 Beautiful and poingnent tale of an old man's rebirth. December 24, 2007
3 out of 7 found this review helpful
This little jewel of a novel has been my introduction to the famous South American author and, due to its brevity, will no doubt serve that purpose for others. If, as some critics have claimed, this is lightweight compared to some of his esteemed earlier novels, then I cannot wait to savour them as much as I did this. That an 80 year old author can so effortlessly turn a simple story, involving an old man and a teenage whore, into something both profoundly moving and lyrically beautiful is a testament both to the mastery of his art and indeed to the moral of the story. And that is that the human spirit and capacity for love should be crushed neither by old age nor by the shadow of death.
The jaded protaganist, a weekly newspaper coloumnist, after a lifetime of study and careful detachment from the intimacies and complications of sexual love (he only sleeps with prostitutes) has reached the point where even the physical mechanics of paid for sex are slipping beyond him. Yet on his 90th birthday, on sleeping with, and yet not touching, a beautiful, 14 year old prostitute, he begins an extraordinary love affair with her that effects possibly the most poetical rage against the dying of the light in all of modern literature.
Marquez therefore adds his distinguished name to a small band of authors, who in the last few years, have examined what it means for a man to grow old, to face inevitible decline and death, the loss of one's individual sexual powers mirroring the decline in the status of the male in general, and in particular the older male, in the modern world. Like these other authors, he also bravely explores the possibility of physical and spiritual regeneration in the sexual love for a much younger female. Each writer has addressed these themes in their own particular way. Michael Houellebecq through philosophy, J.M.Coetzee through gender politics, and here, we have it expressed through sheer, unadulterated, lyricism.
Tales of a dirty old man June 28, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Finding beauty and romance in child prostitution is unforgivable, no matter how deceptively a writer might frame it. In Memories of My Melancholy Whores, GGM returns to a theme which he seemingly cannot leave alone, that of paedophilia. As in Of Love and Other Demons, the subject matter is the love between an adult and a child. In the case of this book, the child is 14 years old and is forced into prostitution by economic hardship. Repulsion is the only word I can use to describe what I felt when I read this book.
Do none of the other readers who have waxed lyrical about this book see this, or has child prostitution and paedophilia become OK amongst the intelligensia????
A lyrical little masterpiece March 17, 2007
15 out of 22 found this review helpful
Memoria de mis putas tristes is a gorgeous novella written in a way that makes life, despite its hardships, uncertainties and inherent unfairness, beautiful. Marquez's protagonist is a 90-year-old man who is rather ugly but has the "instrument" of a "burro" (to paraphrase a woman who knows), a man who has found his only love among prostitutes. He has a certain timeless eminence about him that inspires people to call him "Don Scholar." He is something of a miracle, still active and full of energy, still writing a weekly column for the local newspaper, cynical yet sentimental, a man who loves women and sees their beauty regardless of age or station in life.
Now suddenly as his tenth decade of life is upon him he is seized with the desire to know an adolescent virgin once before he dies. He contacts his old friend and madam Rosa Cabarcas and demands that she come up with exactly that bill of fare and--time being of the essence in more ways than one when you're ninety--that she do it today, now.
Amazingly enough, Rosa Cabarcas, being the excellent business woman that she is, finds just such a girl. She is illiterate, from the country. She is 14-years-old and works in a button factory all day long to help support her younger brothers and crippled mother. Naturally she is tired when the old man arrives at the bordello. In fact she is asleep. And perhaps that is for the best, all things considered.
The old man does not wake her. He barely touches her. He admires her, feels vitalized by her youth, the feel of her skin, her scent, and the soft rise and fall of her breath. Just this and this alone he experiences before he falls sweetly, languidly, hopelessly in love with her. He becomes a man refueled with the fire of life. His column in the newspaper becomes the love letters he would write to her that instead go out to all who read the newspaper, and, because they are true and deeply felt, they inspire.
Gabo got his inspiration for this little masterpiece from the Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata, who wrote a novella entitled "House of the Sleeping Beauties." Marquez quotes the opening lines of that novella as a keynote for his own novella: "He was not to do anything in bad taste, the women of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything else of that sort."
As the story progresses we learn bit by bit more and more about the old man's life and loves. We meet eventually the woman he jilted on her wedding day; we meet his maid who still comes in once a week and learn that he has had some fleeting "knowledge" of her; and we learn of his mother who through a clever subterfuge got him his first writing gig with El Diario de La Paz. All the while the story progresses as the old Don becomes "mad with love" for the first time in his life.
Ah, to fall in love with a sleeping beauty for the first time at the age of 90! And to feel it with such passion! Only a gifted artist and virtuoso craftsman like Gabriel Garcia Marquez could make this so sweet, so filled with the zest of life and so real. His prose is like fresh rose petals still on the tree in the spring, delicate, gorgeous, overwhelming in their vibrant color and strong like the tree itself from which they come.
Part of the power of the novella's prose is no doubt in the translation by Edith Grossman. The words race across the pages, delighting the eye and the ear as they sing of life and love and a very distant death in a way that makes the living magical.
If you have never read Columbian-born, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this is an excellent place to begin.
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