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Memories Of My Melancholy Whores
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The famed author's first work of fiction in ten years is a novella about an experienced lover (over 500 prostitutes and counting) who, for his 90th birthday, wishes to spend the night with a virgin teen.
Knopf, 128 pages
10/25/2005
$20.00
ISBN: 140004460X
Fiction
General Literature & Fiction
NOTES:
Translated into English by Edith Grossman.
All reviews are classified as one of five grades: Outstanding (4 points), Favorable (3), Mixed (2), Unfavorable (1) and Terrible (0). To calculate the Metascore, we divide total points achieved by the total points possible (i.e., 4 x the number of reviews), with the resulting percentage (multiplied by 100) being the Metascore. Learn more...
Booklist Brad Hooper
Garcia Marquez's beautiful, poignant story both avoids sentimentality and escapes salaciousness. [Aug 2005, p. 1953]
Library Journal Lawrence Olszewski
Garcia Marquez, in his late seventies and suffering from lymph cancer, has appropriately paired a fictional memoir to join the first volume of his true memoirs published in 2003. [1 Sept 2005, p. 130]
Los Angeles Times Gene H. Bell-Villada
This is an exquisitely wrought tale, and Edith Grossman's translation ably captures its autumnal beauty. [6 Nov 2005]
The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Peter Oliva
A delight, a clean gem from a master storyteller. [29 Oct 2005]
The New Yorker John Updike
His prose displays, in Edith Grossmanâs expert translation, the chiselled stateliness and colorful felicities that distinguish everything Garcia Marquez composes.
Washington Post Marie Arana
Unlike the mesmeric novels of Garcia Marquez's past, this one is skeletal, horned. Requiring near biblical contemplation.
The Nation Michael Wood
Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exploration of old age and desire, and life certainly invented most of the stories we tell about both of them.
The New York Times Book Review Terrence Rafferty
The cunning of Memories of My Melancholy Whores lies in the utter--and utterly unexpected--reliability of its narrator.
TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Michael Kerrigan
The dirty-old-man-of-letters label will not stick. Not for Garcia Marquez, nor for his narrator, although sexual exploitation--like other sorts--is taken for granted in his world.
Village Voice Brandon Stosuy
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's newest [doesn't] rank with [his] best, though the septuagenarian grandmaster probably [isn't] sweating it.
The Guardian Gaby Woods
True to form, [Garcia Marquez's] latest novella is a trick of a book... in the end, Memoria de Mis Putas Tristes [Memories of My Melancholy Whores] is, more than anything, a fairy tale: sentimental, unforgiving, wise, ironic and twisted. [Review of Spanish language edition]
Salon Allen Barra
The poetry in [Garcia Marquez's] telling of the affair is in the plainness and subtlety in evoking a life that, as it approaches its end, glows, for the first time, with a hard gemlike flame.
San Francisco Chronicle David Hellman
With each reading, new layers of meaning unfold, and this is a book that demands rereading.
Houston Chronicle John Freeman
Memories of My Melancholy Whores is not a story about a man who finds eros in the nick of time, but about how much sway the idea of it has over us, even at the end of our days.
Kirkus Reviews
There is no indication--unless it is the word "melancholy" in the title--that Garcia Marquez means his tale to be the parody of macho idiocy it appears to be. His hero ends revitalized and radiantly optimistic, while readers are left wondering, "Can he be serious?" [15 Jul 2005, p. 754]
Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore
Although I read the novel avidly enough, the end effect is disconcertingly flat. There are careless touches, as though Marquez were weary of his creations. The translation, too, is oddly stilted.
Publishers Weekly
Though enough grace notes are struck to produce echoes of eloquence, this flatness keeps the memories as melancholy as the women themselves. [22 Aug 2005, p. 34]
New York Review Of Books J. M. Coetzee
Measured by the highest standards, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is not a major achievement. Nor is its slightness just a consequence of its brevity.
The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
The trajectory of this narrative turns out to be highly predictable, leading to a banal ending to a banal story that's quite unworthy of the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez's prodigious talents.
USA Today Deirdre Donahue
Unfortunately, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, [Garcia Marquez's] first work of fiction in a decade, is pretty thin, and a real letdown compared with his brilliant autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, published in 2003
Entertainment Weekly Raymond Fiore
A purely intentioned but emotionally hollow novella.
The Guardian Alberto Manguel
Garcia Marquez's writing, so colourful and inventive in the celebrated masterpieces for which he deservedly received the Nobel prize in 1982... is in these pages flat and conventional... the resulting memories are not melancholy, not even sad, but merely pitiful and disappointing.
The Independent Amanda Hopkinson
The scenes and descriptions when the writing ignites are fewer and further between than in any earlier Garcia Marquez. This is matched by a variable translation that reads as if rushed.
The Independent Ian Thomson
[Garcia Marquez's] latest novel is a tired, Lolita-like fable about an old man's lust for a teenage girl.
Wall Street Journal Lauren Weiner
The story's worldly-wise atmospherics don't cover its misogyny any better than a lady of the evening covers her decolletage.
 The average user rating for this book is 8.6 (out of 10) based on 8 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
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