Fiction: In Gabriel García Márquez's earlier masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera, he traced a love that took almost half a century to come to fruition. In One Hundred Years of Solitude he explored, among other things, sex and love in an epic setting. In this new book - his first work of fiction in a decade - the scale is modest and the result all the more intense for it, writes John MacKenna
Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a very short but magnificently passionate book that observes the tiny intimacies of an unnamed journalist who believed he would never find a relationship that went beyond the carnal. As adolescents he and his companions "forgot in their body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they dreamed".
Almost married once, the man fled from commitment and buried himself between the blankets of journalism, whorehouses, music and books. Life was busy but, as he notes: "After so many years we are still in the same place we always were" and "sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love."
And then, on his 90th birthday, the man meets Delgadina, a 14-year-old girl, who becomes everything to him. He is besotted by the details of her body, ". . . her eyes . . . the colour of water when she woke, the colour of syrup when she laughed, the colour of light when she was annoyed."
In lesser hands, this story might have become salacious, but the relationship between the elderly man and the young girl remains one of deep, respectful and mutual love. Revisiting the memories of the melancholy whores he has known, the old man refuses to allow his relationship with Delgadina to be anything less than truthful. And that same relationship exists between writer and reader. Márquez is not afraid of the intricacies and intimacies of falling in love. He doesn't shy away from the painfully minute. He never tries to sweep his readers into a headlong rush that might disguise the brittleness of his story. And he isn't dazzled by the fact that big often passes, mistakenly, for significant in the literary world.
Towards the end of the novel the old man writes: "I was arranging my languishing papers . . . when the sun broke through the almond trees in the park and the river mail packet, a week late because of the drought, bellowed as it entered the canal in the port. It was, at last, real life with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love . . ."
Love is what this book is about. It hasn't come easily to the narrator but it has come and that's the significant point. Márquez is anxious that we recognise the importance of love. Not the time of its arrival or the state of its apparel but simply that its arrival is a cause for celebration. If this book demands anything it is that love be made welcome and given the place it deserves in each of our hearts.
John MacKenna is a novelist and playwright. His latest play, Breathless, is currently on tour and his fictionalised memoir, Things You Should Know, will be published next year by New Island Books
Memories of my Melancholy Whores By Gabriel García Márquez Translated by Edith Grossman Jonathan Cape, 115 pp. £10