Sam Leith
Sex and Senility
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
By Gabriel García Márquez
Jonathan Cape 115pp £10 order from our bookshop
As opening lines go, it's undoubtedly an eyecatcher: ‘The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.’ Lord alone knows what they put in the water in South America, but I want some. Consider, though, aside from the goatish premise and the gentle self-mockery of ‘wild love’, how that sentence sets out Márquez's stall. That phrase: ‘give myself the gift’. It implies, first, that there's nobody else to give the narrator a present; and it hints too at his extraordinary self-absorption. Also, there's the suggestion of a transaction – the adolescent virgin's participation in the festivities is, as it were, in the narrator's gift. She's a sure thing. She's a whore.
Márquez's nameless narrator – who enjoys the advantage of what is at one point described as ‘the tool of a galley slave’ and at another a ‘burro's cock’ – is, in fact, an inveterate visitor of brothels: ‘I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay, and
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying
'This problem has dogged Labour’s efforts to become the "natural party of government", a sobriquet which the Conservatives have acquired over decades, despite their far less compelling record of achievement.'
Charles Clarke on Labour's civil wars.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/comrade-versus-comrade
'Lamb has always attracted admirers ... Yet, as Eric G Wilson observes, "Dream-Child" is the first full-scale biography in over a century.'
Edward Weech on the life and work of Charles Lamb.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-man-with-the-golden-pun