MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES
By Gabriel García Márquez,
Jonathan Cape, Rs 450

Nostalgia is not what it used to be. One could agree with that witticism if one had not read the latest novel by Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, his first in ten years.

This is a novel as redolent in nostalgia as it is in a fading sensuousness. It is the novel about an old rake trying to secure love on his ninetieth birthday. A cynical journalist whose whores did not leave him any time to get married decides, on the day he turns ninety, to have a ?night of mad love with a virgin adolescent?. The experience has an impact which he had not quite bargained for.

In his chosen brothel, he sees the girl for the first time, naked and asleep. He becomes obsessed with her even though he does not speak to her, does not get to know her, and of course, given his age, does not get to have sex with her. She comes to occupy his mind. He had come to believe that ?sex is the consolation one has for not finding enough love? but the virgin in the brothel, whom he insists on calling Delgadina, sets him off in the quest for love and puts his mind firmly on nostalgia lane.

His memories are to do with women: whores, the girl he was engaged to but never married, his mother and his housekeeper. There is also the old parental house, now in decay, in one corner of which he now lives.

M?rquez evokes the house unforgettably: ?The house is spacious and bright, with stucco arches and floors tiled in Florentine mosaics, and four glass doors leading to a wraparound balcony where my mother would sit on March nights to sing love arias with other girls, her cousins. From there you can see San Nicol?s Park, the cathedral, and the statue of Christopher Columbus, and beyond that the warehouses on the river wharf and the vast horizon of the Great Magdalena River twenty leagues distant from its estuary. The only unpleasant aspect of the house is that the sun keeps changing windows in the course of the day, and all of them have to be closed when you try to take a siesta in the torrid half-light. When I was left on my own, at the age of thirty-two, I moved into what had been my parents? bedroom, opened a doorway between that room and the library, and began to auction off whatever I didn?t need to live, which turned out to be almost everything but the books and the Pianola rolls.?

The novel has a languid pace, nothing takes place. This is emphatically not a novel of action. A stream of memories and an association of ideas make the narrator move through his life. The ninetieth birthday becomes an expected perch from which to look backwards, to look at time past. One recalls Shakespeare?s lines, made famous in Scott Moncrieff?s translation of Proust?s masterpiece: ?When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past.?

But the melancholia of old age when coupled with the quest for love in M?rquez?s magical world has rejuvenating qualities even for a ninety-year-old. He looks forward to his century.

This is a novel on a minor key, played as adagio. But it is no less memorable than M?rquez?s more virtuoso performances.