Garcia Marquez novella is a hypnotizing, carnal dream

“To be reductive and glib about Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s ravishing new novella, Memories of My Melancholy Whores (Knopf, $20), one could say that Death in Venice meets Lolita. Or that Ivan Ilyich hums along with J. Alfred Prufrock. Or that Santiago in Hemingway’s big-fish story catches, instead of a giant marlin, the Jodie Foster of Taxi Driver. From his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, we know that a motherly madam let the student Gabo sleep in her open-air beach brothel when he was broke. From his novel about his parents, Love in the Time of Cholera, we also know that poetry, music and Eros aren’t the exclusive properties of the swinish young. So it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise when the nameless Colombian newspaper columnist and music critic in Memories decides, for his 90th birthday, to buy himself the present of “a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.””

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