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Ever since I first read a recommendation for “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in my cultural psychology textbook, I have been more than fascinated with GGM’s work, and made it my mission to read his novels. I started in early 2005 with “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, and read “Of Love and Other Demons” in October, a short while ago. After reading the latter, I was convinced that I would love all of his work, and that same week I went to the bookstore and picked up his 2004 novel “Memories of my Melancholy Whores”, translated in Dutch. Usually I read books in the English language, but I wanted this book badly enough to just get the Dutch one and in the end it really didn’t matter; with GGM I enjoy the content of the text, not the package.

Yes, I liked “Memories of my Melancholy Whores”, extremely well. GGM always has amazing and lively characters. This is the first novel I read where he used the first perspective. What I find most important when I read books written in the first person, is that there has to be a convincing enough amount of empathy from the writer. I have to feel like I am reading an autobiography. And in this case, it felt like I was reading a real story. Not only because it felt personal – all the embarrassments of the character came forward, his fears, his weaknesses, his secrets – but also because it is a realistic kind of scenario. Everyone grows older, and are faced with the possibility – or in this case the certainty – of imminent death. In a very short novel, we learn everything about the character. (Except his name.) GGM always pulls that off well in his characters.

The story is about a man on the eve of his 90th birthday. Never having loved anyone, he decided this birthday might very well be his last, and he calls the mistress (Rosa) of the whorehouse he used to frequent (his only way of physical contact or any contact with women) and asks her for a virgin, for his 90th birthday. Rosa obliges, and has for him a 14 year-old girl. But careful – she sleeps. During the day the girl works sowing buttons at a factory and is exhausted.

The story basically continues as follows: the girl always sleeps in his presence and he never manages to ‘pop her cherry’. Nonetheless, for the first time the man can admire a woman, and he falls in a desperate kind of love. He spends his time writing loveletters which are published in the newspaper where he worked as a journalist for years, and becomes a local celebrity as a result. He also tries his best to create a sort of imaginative home for the two of them at the room of the whorehouse, by putting paintings there and other decorative items. In a way, the old man feels like he is finally living with a woman.

How I interpreted the story, is as follows.

In the virgin, he finds a new beginning for himself; a chance to live a life he always neglected, thinking there would be time for love later. Now with death coming closer, the man wants nothing more than to just feel alive, and with the girl he does. The girl being asleep all the time for him keeps the fantasy alive of sleeping next to ‘his woman’. Fear of losing this possibility and waking up to a cruel reality where she is just a whore-to-be keeps him from waking her up, even though he really desires her physically. Him wanting love in his final moments instead of a whore like he had in all of his lifetime keeps him from turning the girl into a whore. He calls her Delgadina, is in love with Delgadina - and wishes to not know her real name as to protect himself from his love being an unrequited love.

The story ends in quite an uplifting way. GGM sits there writing a book about being old, being miserable, feeling ugly, lying to yourself and waiting for death… and makes it uplifting. It is possible.

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