Book Report: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Memories of My Melancholy Whores: Torgo disapproves

Speaking of short, this book clocks in at about 115 pages. I read it in a day, which is no small feat considering I also spent that day with the boy. My well-documented love of short novels, though, isn't enough for me to recommend this book.

I trudged through Love in the Time of Cholera and breezed through Chronicle of a Death Foretold. I was more or less irritated throughout Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

I'm not going to sit here and preach about how wrong it is for a ninety year old man to decide on his 90th birthday that what he needs is a virgin prostitute and, when he finds a 14-year-old girl, to idolize her and fall in love with her and claim her as his own. Nor am I going to say how much of a misogynist that old man is and how wrong it is for Garcia Marquez to glorify the old lecher.

Wait, no, actually, I am.

I mean, for god's sake, she's 14! Worse still, she has no voice. She never speaks. I could interpret this as bearing some meaning on the author's part. She has no voice because she's a trope of the narrator's creation, a symbol of his lost virility, the innocence and beauty of youth, all that crap.

No. She's a peasant girl desperate for money. He's a creepy old man ogling her while she sleeps. She has no voice because she's completely unreal. We're meant to believe that she loves the old man by the end of the book. How? It seems that every time they're together, she's asleep. Because he pays her like a whore then just stares at her?

This gets at another problem I have with the book. Edith Grossman translated, and I loved her work with Don Quixote. But either she's let me down or the source material was too weak here because there seemed to be plot holes and inconsistencies too apparent for such a short novel. I'd go into them here, but I don't want to exert the effort.