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The review I wrote for amazon.
A curious and lovely book
In the US, we understand sexy but we struggle with the erotic. We read the body like we read the newspaper, by habit; with a glance. Our real failure in love is our failure to take our time. It's not in our nature to wait, to sample, to savor. We rush into love as if we were late to an appointment. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES doesn't rush. The book is a seduction and moves at that quiet lazy confident pace. The protagonist turns 90 and, mindful of his mortality, wants what he's never had: "A night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." Of course, desire is a dream and dreams are an attempt to remember. And, what do we want to remember, everything, everyone we've ever loved. Memory, though, is an admission of loss. Desire is our strategy to reclaim what was lost. Of course, memory is a trickster...and that's part of the joy of this book, as the "Professor," defies death less through contact with flesh, than though memory and desire. In this book as in life, it is the approach, it is anticipation, that sets us on fire.
A curious and lovely book
In the US, we understand sexy but we struggle with the erotic. We read the body like we read the newspaper, by habit; with a glance. Our real failure in love is our failure to take our time. It's not in our nature to wait, to sample, to savor. We rush into love as if we were late to an appointment. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES doesn't rush. The book is a seduction and moves at that quiet lazy confident pace. The protagonist turns 90 and, mindful of his mortality, wants what he's never had: "A night of wild love with an adolescent virgin." Of course, desire is a dream and dreams are an attempt to remember. And, what do we want to remember, everything, everyone we've ever loved. Memory, though, is an admission of loss. Desire is our strategy to reclaim what was lost. Of course, memory is a trickster...and that's part of the joy of this book, as the "Professor," defies death less through contact with flesh, than though memory and desire. In this book as in life, it is the approach, it is anticipation, that sets us on fire.
