Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

Dirty old man finds inappropriate love

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella by Colombian author and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014). It was published in Spanish in 2004, and an English translation was released the following year. This is a very short work that really belongs in a collection of short stories rather than a stand-alone book. This novella is not set in the fictional village of Macondo where many of García Márquez’s other works take place, like his famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and his other three novellas. Instead, Memories of My Melancholy Whores takes place in an urban setting. The city is unspecified, but based on the names of streets, parks, newspapers, etc., it’s a safe bet to say the story is set in Colombia. 

The novella is narrated by an elderly man who I believe is unnamed. Some refer to him as “the scholar.” He appears to be a writer and perhaps a former academic of some sort. He writes a weekly column for his city’s newspaper. This man has never married. He states that in his entire life he has never been in love and has only slept with prostitutes—around 500 different prostitutes by his count. On his 90th birthday, this man decides that he wants to celebrate the landmark event by deflowering a young virgin, so he calls up his favorite madam, who agrees to procure the virgin for him. When he shows up at the whorehouse, he is led into a room where he finds a naked 14-year-old girl lying asleep. Rather than claim the service he paid for, the old man decides to simply watch the girl sleep. The way this is presented, García Márquez seems to want us to find this charming, but the old man also fondles the girl while she sleeps, which is not charming. Even though the two do not speak, the man falls in love with the girl, or so the author would have us believe. The scholar returns to the bordello for repeat rendezvous with this girl, who remains a sleeping beauty during their encounters.

Obviously, there’s some problematic subject matter here. Even García Márquez, one of the most highly acclaimed authors of the last 75 years, did not get a free pass on this creepy sex fantasy. The work was met with some critical and public backlash upon its publication. This is not really an erotic tale, and the sexuality is more implied than graphic. García Márquez uses the whore scenario to comment on old age, lost youth, masculinity, and mortality. The story is told with an attempt at humor that includes dirty-grandpa jokes about the old man’s sexual prowess. Prostitution, even child prostitution, is romanticized in this book as if it were some kind of cultural touchstone. Love between old men and young women has been a common theme in literature since ancient times. The way García Márquez tells this story has a feeling of mythology or fable about it, like when Zeus used to come down from Olympus and deflower virgins. It’s not quite the clueless pedophilia one finds in a lot of Victorian novels, but it’s pedophilia nonetheless, and García Márquez should have known better. An esteemed author might have gotten away with this in 2004, but two decades later it’s unlikely a man could publish a story like this without it inspiring some well-deserved outrage.

Regardless of its controversial subject matter, Memories of My Melancholy Whores just isn’t that great of a read. It’s not only offensive but also feels inconsequential. It just left me wondering what’s the point?

Collected Novellas by Gabriel García Márquez

Colombia’s Faulkner

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature largely on the strength of his highly esteemed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book Collected Novellas, first published in 1991, brings together three lesser-known works of shorter fiction that complement that bestselling classic.

Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s first book, was published in 1955. He uses the phrase “leaf storm” to signify the influx of foreign interests that turned a small Colombian village into a boom town for the fruit industry. Against this backdrop, the story deals with the death of a citizen who was far from beloved by his fellow townspeople. The narrative is related through the alternating first-person perspectives of a father, daughter, and grandson who knew the deceased. Through a series of chronologically jumbled scenes, García Márquez reveals the back story of the dead man, from his arrival in town to his demise, as well as the private secrets of the family of narrators. Stylistically, this novella bears much resemblance to the writing of William Faulkner in novels like As I Lay Dying. I would have also sworn that Leaf Storm was influenced by Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, but the two books were released in the same year, so any cause-and-effect relationship between the two seems unlikely.

The next selection, No One Writes to the Colonel, was first published in 1958. An aged and destitute veteran of a previous civil war (the Thousand Days’ War of 1899–1902) awaits the military pension he was promised. The current regime has placed his village under martial law. Again, death and funerary matters play a prominent role in the story, as the Colonel attends the funeral of a local musician. The final selection, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, published in 1981, is the best-known of the three works in this volume and the most compelling. In the opening pages, an Arab Colombian named Santiago Nasar is murdered. García Márquez then flashes back to reveal the story behind the killing, which he relates in a nonlinear fashion through the perspectives of various witnesses. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the crime is that everyone in town, except the victim, seems to see the murder coming, and most simply accept it as a foregone conclusion.

Though stand-alone works in their own right, these three novellas are set in the same fictional universe as One Hundred Years of Solitude. Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel both take place in Macondo, the same fictional village in which One Hundred Years is set. Macondo is García Márquez’s equivalent to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, another fictional setting that unifies multiple related novels. Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not mention Macondo, but, like the other two novellas included here, García Marquez does drop the name of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a character from One Hundred Years of Solitude who figures prominently in the history of this fictional vision of Colombia, much like Faulkner often refers to the Snopes and Compson families in his Yoknapatawpha novels. I use Faulkner here merely as a stylistic comparison and don’t mean to imply that García Márquez’s writings are in any way derivative of or inferior to those of Faulkner. In fact, I prefer the writings of García Márquez. He uses the same modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear chronology, and varying narrative perspectives, but unlike Faulkner he doesn’t overly indulge in deliberately obscure wordplay. Chronicle of a Death Foretold impressed me even more than One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the other two novellas in this collection are also very fine works worthy of a Nobel laureate.

Novellas in this collection

Leaf Storm

No One Writes to the Colonel

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez

Enchanting family saga with frustrating family tree

Colombian-Mexican author Gabriel García Marquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, is arguably the most celebrated figure in Latin American literature, and One Hundred Years of Solitude is widely regarded as his greatest work. Published in 1967, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a multi-generational saga of a Colombian family, the Buendías. After committing a crime, the clan’s visionary patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, flees into the wilderness and establishes a town, named Macondo, in a secluded swamp. Over time the town grows, as does its founding family. Yet Macondo remains largely isolated, removed from the outside world not only by distance and remoteness but also by the occurrence of extraordinary and uncanny events that defy conventional reality.

One highly commendable quality of García Marquez’s prose is that, unlike many other Latin American modernists (Carlos Fuentes for example), he doesn’t indulge in needless Faulknerian wordplay. Rather than deliberately obfuscate the plot with verbal gymnastics, García Marquez’s prose (or at least the translation by Gregory Rabassa) tells this astonishing story in, forgive the expression, plain English. That’s not to say that this is an easy text to read. The difficulty comes not from having to decode the author’s language, however, but simply from the barrage of happenings that are foisted upon the reader. While every page of this book contains fascinating scenes, the relentless bombardment of events makes it hard to keep track of everything that’s going on. When you get to the end of a chapter, you might not remember how it began.

This novel is recognized as the epitome of the genre known as “magic realism.” Fantastical events frequently occur, including conversations with the dead, flying carpets, or a torrential rain that falls incessantly for years. Among European literature, this style recalls the work of German author Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum. Both authors relate the histories of their respective homelands through a fun-house lens of humor, metaphor, and surreality. While Grass, however, gets a kick out of using bizarre imagery to shock and disgust the reader, the outlandish occurrences in One Hundred Years of Solitude inspire the reader with awe, enchantment, and at times delight. García Marquez’s Macondo is an inviting cabinet of curiosities. The only aspect that can be considered disturbing is the recurring theme of incest.

The novel includes a diagram charting the family tree of the Buendías, which is very helpful. In fact, the book would be unreadable without it. Though his prose is brisk and beguiling, García indulges in one stylistic convention that makes this novel unnecessarily difficult to read. The saga spans six generations and covers the lives of dozens of characters. Of the male family members, half are named Arcadio and the other half Aureliano. I realize García Marquez is trying to make a point—all the Arcadios share similar personality traits, as do the Arcadios—but couldn’t he have at least picked two names that begin with different letters? Imagine a book full of Bills and Bobs. I found myself consulting the family tree on almost every page, and still often didn’t know which brother, father, or son I was reading about. After a while I stopped caring and just let the intriguing events wash over me regardless. While I enjoyed and admired this novel, I would have appreciated it twice as much without this frustrating name game.

García Marquez is a giant of Latin American literature, and if this book is any indication, deservedly so. Still, this novel is a more difficult read than it has any good reason to be. I look forward to enjoying some other book of his where I don’t have to sort out all the Arcadios and Aurelianos.
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