Memories of My Melancholy Whores

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2007

  $6.78

  Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a powerful novel about a man who so far has never felt love from Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, author of the One Hundred Years of Solitude . The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin. On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a newspaper columnist in Colombia decides to give himself 'a night of mad love with a virgin adolescent'. But on seeing this beautiful girl he falls deeply under her spell. His love for his 'Delgadina' causes him to recall all the women he has paid to perform acts of love. And so the columnist realises he must chronicle the life of his heart, to offer it freely to the world... Marquez describes this amorous, sometimes disturbing journey with the grace and vigour of a master storyteller. ( Daily Mail ). Marquez is wonderful on the transformative and redemptive powers of love...storytelling magic. ( Tatler ). Marquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do. (Salman Rushie). As one of the pioneers of magic realism and perhaps the most prominent voice of Latin American literature, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has received international recognition for his novels, works of non-fiction and collections of short stories. Those published in translation by Penguin include Autumn of the Patriarch , Bon Voyage Mr. President , Chronicle of a Death Foretold , Collected Stories , The General in his Labyrinth , In Evil Hour , Innocent Erendira and Other Stories , Leaf Storm , Living to Tell the Tale , Love in the Time of Cholera , News of a Kidnapping , No-one Writes to the Colonel , Of Love and Other Demons , The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor and Strange Pilgrims .

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $3.78

  Memories of My Melancholy Whores is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first work of fiction in ten years, and it fully lives up to the expectations of his critics, readers, and fans of all ages and nationalities. Memories of My Melancholy Whores introduces us to a totally new genre of Garcia Marquez's writing. It is a fairy tale for the aged - a story that celebrates the belated discovery of amorous passion in old age. This enticingly sensual, yet at the same time innocent adventure tells of an unnamed second-rate reporter who on the eve of his ninetieth birthday decides to give himself 'a night of mad love with a virgin adolescent'. In a little more than 100 pages, Garcia Marquez proceeds to describe a series of encounters that is hypnotising and disturbing. When he first sees the chosen girl - a shy fourteen-year-old, whom he calls Delgadina - asleep, entirely naked, in the brothel room, his life begins to change completely. He never speaks to her nor does he learn anything about her, nor she of him. But, her presence spurs the aged pensioner to recall his experiences with the other women in his life, all whores by profession, all paid to perform for him the acts of love. But, now he realizes that 'sex is the consolation one has for not finding enough love'. Smitten, he screams of his love from the rooftops, which for him means writing about it in his weekly newspaper columns, and in return, he becomes the most famous man in his town. Love has always been a major theme in Garcia Marquez's writing. It is often visualized in his fiction as a source of endurance, a bulwark against the rush of time's passage. In Love in the Time of Cholera , he celebrated a love that was almost fifty years in forming, modelling it on the courtship of his own grandparents. This last novel, written at the peak of the author's fame, is another illustration of its tranformative power. Memories of My Melancholy Whores , written in Garcia Marquez's incomparable style, movingly contemplates the misfortunes of old age, and celebrates the joys of being in love.

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $14.21