Ninety Years of Company

"I pleaded for at least a chance to approach the truth." When met with this sort of cliched profundity, readers of Gabriel García Márquez's new novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores are liable to forget the title of the book they are holding, the brilliance of any one of the dozens of preceding paragraphs, and the facts of the statement itself. A more-than-eccentric nonagenarian has just asked the owner of a brothel, where he has spent the better part of his years, for some sign that the teenage virgin who is the object of his elderly desires has returned. That deep meaning could be so easily confused for lust is the unfortunate failing of Márquez's work.

The story itself does not start off on bad ground. As a rambling reflection on aging penned by a master novelist who is himself growing old, the book is certainly retreading some well-weathered ground. There are enough idiosyncrasies and perverse subversions, however, that the narrative seems destined to eke out some topsy-turvy meaning on the weary virtues of aging or at least mess around a bit with the accidental readers who thought all novels of this size and subject were written by Mitch Albom.

Quickly, we learn that our narrator is turning 90 and holds the arcane position of cable editor as well as columnist at a local newspaper. He exudes an air of stuffy erudition that comes from owning a large collection Greek and Latin books, and has stopped keeping a list of the number of women he's had sexual intercourse with, which hit 514 sometime around his 50th birthday. Not a bad set of baggage. In retrospect, though, the first line is not complete before all of the quirky possibilities have been undermined. In setting out his quest to give himself the birthday gift of "a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin," the narrator has preordained the course of the next hundred-odd pages. His oddities have proved insurmountable in such a short space, and thus, his course has been set. He will trade a romanticism grown over a century filled with intellectual discovery and void of personal relationships for the pains of an actual romance. Márquez will trade an armful of potentialities for a sentimentalism in which his character's quest is hopeless, and his realization of this is inevitable.

Essentially, Memories founders in the no-man's-land between expectations marked for short stories and those reserved for full-fledged novels, a land that Márquez himself navigated skillfully in the potent Chronicle of a Death Foretold. It falls prey to problems that plague all novellas-the reasons why Animal Farm only works once and why no one I know actually likes The Pearl. Perhaps the problem is that most story germs that lend themselves to the novella treatment are miscalculations, rendering what are in reality underdeveloped novels or overextended stories, with large, fleshy underbellies of weakness.

To offer something beyond the slice of life without the luxury of hundreds of pages devoted to an intricate plot and complex character development is a decidedly frustrating endeavor. In the case of Márquez's book, the problem is that it tries to do much more than this. Offering up a deep theme that must be tied up in a hundred pages is liable to become pedantic and artificial-and at times Memories does.

Edith Grossman, however, is never short of brilliant in her translation work, capturing the tics of the narrator's stodgy affairs and wild exploits in a prose so vivid that it almost distracts from the near-teleological overarching framework of the book. Maybe this was cake for Grossman, though, because Memories reads like a modern-day, distilled Don Quixote-Márquez's bumbling bookworm, like Quixote, attempts to conform the real world to his romantic visions. Let us be thankful that Cervantes, unlike Marquez, saw fit not to confine his opus to the triple digits.