A fairy tale gone sour

Memories of my melancholy whores
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Jonathan Cape
�� 10.00
Pages 443
Readers who have warm memories of that other story of late love, love in the time of cholera, are liikely to be disappointed by this novella. The protagonist is certainly an individual, but not really interesting enough to make us care what happens to him
A ninety-year-old man looking for an adolescent virgin with whom to celebrate his birthday with "a night of wild love,"���an unsavoury subject for a novella, even if we know it is Marquez, and even if we remember that men of all ages look for virgins for even less attractive reasons, getting rid of sexually transmitted diseases, among them.But because it's Marquez, there's a twist to the tale.
The unnamed protagonist has never married, and says the time he spent in brothels didn't give him time to marry. He does once get almost trapped by a sexually rapacious young female, but doesn't show up at the altar on their wedding day.
He is a scholar of sorts, a poor teacher of Spanish and Latin, a columnist, a second-rate journalist, without close friends, and he has never been in love.
He is writing his weekly column when "the August sun exploded among the almond trees in the park, and the riverboat that carried the mail...came bellowing into the port canal," and it is then that he has his great idea for his birthday celebration.
The blurb describes this novella, Marquez's first book in ten years, as "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."
The evocation of all this hovers between fairy tale and senile hallucinations, farce and sensuality, machismo and tenderness. The girl the madam finds for him is asleep when he arrives the first time, and remains asleep throughout the night, and through all his subsequent visits.
He begins to bring pictures and vases from home, to give the girl something to look at when she awakes. He spends his time (when he is not asleep himself), wiping away her perspiration, touching the outlines of her body. She seems to respond in some way in her sleep. At home, he begins to feel she is with him all the time, sharing meals and chores.
He never does get his night of wild love, though at the end the madam assures him the girl is in love with him. He then begins to write columns on love which turn out to be wildly popular and are even read on radio.
Readers who have warm memories of that other story of late love, Love in the Time of Cholera, are likely to be disappointed by this novella. The main protagonist here is certainly an individual, but not really interesting enough to make us care what happens to him. And the women are all stereotypes or fantasy figures.
The virgin with whom the protagonist is fixated is a fantasy figure, even to him in some ways. When the madam mentions the girl's birthday he thinks, "It troubled me that she was real enough to have birthdays." And the brothel madam is a brothel madam.
At home is a servant-woman he raped, and continues to rape, and she confesses at the end she was in love with him! And the end is certainly ambiguous: he's overjoyed that, according to the madam, the girl is head over heels in love with him.
Should the aged, especially those who feel younger than they look, take heart? Memories of My Melancholy Whores is finally an unsatisfactory book, and that in itself will be a first for Marquez fans. The writing, confident as ever, never quite dispels the queasy-making premise. The result is a book from which one takes little away.