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fondof_hats 's review for:
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel García Márquez
As always from Gabriel Garcia Marquez, this novella contains stunning descriptive language, players who act at once languid and fiery on their balmy equatorial stage, and no shortage of wise and practical meditations on time, age, sex, and love. I enjoyed his writing nearly as much as ever, and found that here, as in his longer works, he captures with precision the small struggles of everyday life in the beautiful web of his fiction.
I'm not as enamored with the plot, though. I wasn't able to fully dive into the story because I kept being drawn back out by my unending discomfort with the protagonist. I had a hard time believing that the young girl he calls Delgadina would be numb to that discomfort to the extent that she could sleep peacefully through their encounters and feel at ease while he treated her body with an unearned intimacy, much less actually develop genuine love for the old man. When Rosa Cabarcas announced at the end of the story that the girl was madly in love with him, I was confused by how little that alleged truth aligned with my own conclusions. Looking forward to reading some analysis of the story to see what I may have missed, but I have a hunch that my desire to keep the old man at arm's length for his cantankerousness and entitlement with regard to women will remain intact.
I'm not as enamored with the plot, though. I wasn't able to fully dive into the story because I kept being drawn back out by my unending discomfort with the protagonist. I had a hard time believing that the young girl he calls Delgadina would be numb to that discomfort to the extent that she could sleep peacefully through their encounters and feel at ease while he treated her body with an unearned intimacy, much less actually develop genuine love for the old man. When Rosa Cabarcas announced at the end of the story that the girl was madly in love with him, I was confused by how little that alleged truth aligned with my own conclusions. Looking forward to reading some analysis of the story to see what I may have missed, but I have a hunch that my desire to keep the old man at arm's length for his cantankerousness and entitlement with regard to women will remain intact.