duckoffimreading 's review for:

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

3.0

---

GGM's writing is superb to be sure. This is the first book I've read by him, and I didn't quite know what I was in for. This reminded me a lot of Lolita, not just because of the subject matter - which was not so much pedophilia and more a lifelong absence of true love. I liken it to Lolita because of the age difference of the main characters, but also in how beautiful the writing is and how at the end of the novella, I wanted to sympathize with the narrator. Story, in a nutshell, is about an aging bachelor (who is never identified by name) gifting himself a 14 year old virgin for his 90th birthday. He is a mediocre journalist that never married, but spent most of his earned money on hiring women for his sexual needs and looking for the ultimate experience in untouched purity. He never experienced true love, but after he meets his virgin, and falls in love with her. Having fallen in love with her, he cannot bring himself to complete the act and instead spends night after night sleeping beside her instead, inventing a relationship in his head between them. The story ends before he sleeps with her. Most of the book are flashbacks to the various women he had slept with in his younger years minus true love. Moral of the story: it's never too late to find true love!