Memories of My Melancholy Whores

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Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Author Gabriel García Márquez
Original title Memoria de mis putas tristes
Translator Edith Grossman
Country Colombia
Language Spanish
Genre(s) Novel
Publication date 2004
Published in
English		 2005
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)

Memories of My Melancholy Whores (original Spanish-language title: Memoria de mis putas tristes) is a novella by Gabriel García Márquez.

The book was originally published in Spanish in 2004, with an English translation by Edith Grossman published in October 2005.

Contents

[edit] Plot

As with María dos Prazeres in Strange Pilgrims, the protagonist, an old man, finds love at the end of his life, when he only waits for death. This is the story of a relationship of love and sex between an aging journalist and a working-class child, who sells her virginity to help her family. It deals with memories and solidarity, but also childhood happiness and the discovery of first love.

[edit] Quotation

In my ninetieth year, I decided to give myself the gift of a night of love with a young virgin.
This was something new for me. I was ignorant of the arts of seduction and had always chosen my brides for a night at random, more for their price than their charms, and we had made love without love, half-dressed most of the time and always in the dark, so we could imagine ourselves as better than we were ... That night I discovered the improbable pleasure of contemplating the body of a sleeping woman without the urgencies of desire or the obstacles of modesty.
It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things.
We do not waste away with time; time is a tool that carves away our excess, like a chisel chips away marble to reveal a work of art.
I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay ... by the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once ... My public life, on the other hand, was lacking in interest: both parents dead, a bachelor without a future, a mediocre journalist ... and a favorite of caricaturists because of my exemplary ugliness.

[edit] Time period of the novel

The action of the story takes place on or after the narrator's 90th birthday. The time period of the novel appears to be some time between 1950-1970 but cannot be more closely determined because of the narrator's vagueness and inconsistencies. Among other data that could be used to date the story are these:

  • He says that "as a young man" he once patronized outdoor theaters; but lost his liking for film because of "the cult of Shirley Temple".
  • Later on he says he has been working for the same newspaper "for 50 years", but also "since the last century".
  • There are newspaper and radio reporters at his birthday party but no television reporters and no mention of television at all in the story.
  • There is a military presence in his city which is actively searching for communist terrorists.
  • Finally, the fee for his "virgin" is only five pesos.

[edit] Banning in Iran

A Persian edition of Memories of My Melancholy Whores was published in Iran in October 2007, under the title Memories of My Melancholy Prostitutes. The first edition of 5,000 sold out within three weeks of publication[1], after which it was banned, after the Ministry of Culture received complaints from conservatives who believed the novel was promoting prostitution.[2]

[edit] Editions in print

[edit] References

  1. ^ BBC NEWS | Americas | Iran ban for Garcia Marquez novel
  2. ^ Iran bans Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel AP, accessed on November 17, 2007

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Works by Gabriel García Márquez
Magic realism
Novels:

In Evil Hour • One Hundred Years of Solitude • The Autumn of the Patriarch • Chronicle of a Death Foretold • Love in the Time of Cholera • The General in His Labyrinth • Of Love and Other Demons • Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Short stories:

"Leaf Storm" • "No One Writes to the Colonel" • "Big Mama's Funeral" • "Innocent Eréndira" • "Strange Pilgrims" • "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" •
Non-fiction:

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor • Clandestine in Chile • News of a Kidnapping • Living to Tell the Tale