A tale of prostitutes, old age, youthful beauty and the madness of love brought the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel GarcÃÂa Márquez new critical acclaim as his first novel for a decade reached book shops in the Spanish-speaking world.
A million copies of Memories of My Melancholy Whores went on sale last month in Latin America and Spain, and the publishers celebrated, having outwitted the copyright pirates who had been selling a clandestine version in Colombia.
Its editor, Braulio Peralta, told journalists in Mexico: ”Gabriel GarcÃÂa Márquez changed the last chapter.”
The book, described as a hymn to the renewing qualities of love and the rich possibilities of old age, has been lavished with praise by the critics.
”The prose of GarcÃÂa Márquez is as brilliant as ever and, in the brevity of this novel, gains intensity,” Rosa Mora wrote in Spanish newspaper El Pais.
”The startling thing here is the profound nostalgia that floods the whole tale and in the deep melancholy that this 90-year-old man experiences at seeing a sleeping girl, described as ‘a tender fighting bull’,” the Colombian critic Conrado Zuluaga wrote.
”GarcÃÂa Márquez destroys the biological clock that makes us old and, through his birthday protagonist, suggests that one’s age is not what one has but what one feels,” his fellow Colombian writer Jorge Franco said.
”The only unnecessary thing is the title, because the girls are almost never sad,” the former Colombian culture minister Alberto Casas said.
Its publishers, Random House Mondadori, described the 109-page novel as the story of an ”eccentric, solitary old man, a narrative of his sexual adventures … for which he always paid, never imagining that this would be the way he would discover true love”.
Set in Colombia in the mid-1950s, it tells how an elderly journalist decides he must celebrate his 90th birthday by taking the virginity of a 14-year-old prostitute. But, when he is presented with the ideal candidate, she has been drugged by the brothel madam and refuses to wake up.
In the end he spends the night admiring her youth and naked beauty while renouncing the opportunity to take her virginity and, to his surprise, falling in love for the first time in his life.
For nights on end he observes, strokes, kisses, reads to, sings to and sleeps beside the always dormant object of what becomes a tormented, jealous, but life-giving, love.
”Sex is the consolation that you are left with when you do not attain love,” he concludes, having kept a record of more than 500 prostitutes he has slept with.
Now he finds that his memories are melancholy and the future has become full of terrible excitement, and realises that it is love, not old age, that will kill him.
Turning 90 seems like an opportunity to ”flip myself over on the grill and starting cooking the other side for the next 90 years”.
GarcÃÂa Márquez, the 76-year-old author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera appears to have beaten the book pirates without meaning to, by changing the last chapter for artistic reasons.
”There were some atmospheric feelings [in the chapter] that needed or required certain words to be exchanged for others,” Peralta said.
GarcÃÂa Márquez, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, published a volume of autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, last year. He plans to publish a short novel, We’ll See Each Other in August, soon, Peralta said.
GarcÃÂa Márquez has suffered from lymph cancer in recent years and makes few public appearances. ”It’s a song to life. I think we all know what GarcÃÂa Márquez has gone through in the past few years,” Peralta said. ”We are all worried for his health.”
The protagonist of Memories of My Melancholy Whores is also concerned about his health, and his inevitable death, but concludes that the end will probably be sweet. — Â