"Memories of My Melancholy Whores": Marquez

There is poetry and sadness and decreptitude: in the whores, in the melancholy, in the memories and then in the title as a whole. For someone who has never read a Marquez book in its entirity yet (!), this slim volume (115 pages) was an opportunity to get started I could not pass up.
However, I had read too many reviews which said many different things about the book...

John Updike in the New Yorker:

“Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” reminiscent in its terseness of such stoic fellow-Latins as the Brazilian Machado de Assis and the Colombia-born Álvaro Mutis, is a velvety pleasure to read, though somewhat disagreeable to contemplate; it has the necrophiliac tendencies of the precocious short stories, obsessed with living death, that García Márquez published in his early twenties.

and

“Memories of My Melancholy Whores” feels less about love than about age and illness.
...
The septuagenarian Gabriel García Márquez, while he is still alive, has composed, with his usual sensual gravity and Olympian humor, a love letter to the dying light.

The NYT review had this:

The cunning of "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" lies in the utter - and utterly unexpected - reliability of its narrator. This daft coot is, in his way, as trustworthy as St. Augustine (whom he does not, I hasten to add, otherwise resemble) because his story is, like the saint's, a conversion narrative.

What I found fascinating about this book was its well...breathlessness. Which of course when related to the 90-year old protagonist of the book may well be a truism. I will not go into the story here; John Updike's review is quite masterful.

But I was charmed by, as I said, the pace and the urgency of the book -- and Marquez's use of glorious conceit. So while Updike thinks the book is more about age than love and the NYT reviewer attributes "reliability " to the narrator, I couldn't help being amused at what a ball Marquez seemed to have had when writing the book. What a delightful devil-- brazen, vital, moody, yet a misfit -- he made the 90-year old in his book. There is a levity and even a chutzpah that makes the book poignant and supremely light hearted at the same time. Again, not having read Marquez before I was probably not looking for his familiar modes of portrayals, his handling of love. In this book, the very opening sentence should have put to rest any such expectations: "The year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." Now of course, "wild love with an adolescent virgin" is certainly not about puppy-love...and tho' towards the end there does come about something akin to love, something liberating for the 90-year old, its portrayal by Marquez has as much to do with love as with age, methinks. There are also regrets:

..and in my throat I felt the Gordian knot of all the loves that might have been and weren't. (p. 53)

and some glowing descriptions of the sleeping "adolescent virgin" which bespeak wonder and enrapturement:

Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love. (p 63)

there is of course, awareness of the miracle of being alive at that age:

I was on the verge of ruin but well-compensated by the miracle of being alive at my age. (p. 64)

more observations on love:

I buried myself in the romantic writing, and in them I became aware that the invincible power that had moved the wold is unrequited, not happy, love. (p. 65)

and, of "dying of love":

I always had understood that dying of love was more poetic license. That afternoon, back home again...without her, I proved that it was not only possible but I myself, an old man without anyone, was dying of love. But I also realised that the contrary was true as well: I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world. (p. 84)

and finally, the deeper realisation about life, even if at ninety:

Still, when I woke alive on the first morning of my nineties in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus' ever changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for abother ninety years. (p. 108)

Life, sunny side up, again...viva Marquez!