Memories Of His Melancholy Novella

Marquez's latest, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is dense, lyrical -- and disappointing, because it's undeniably slight. The subject matter itself -- a celebration of a 90-year-old's lust for a teenager -- is likely to put off most. As it does Adam Kirsch, who writes in the New York Sun:

"In the simplified world of Mr. Garcia Marquez's fiction, there is nothing more bewitching than a grand, passionate gesture, regardless of how its motives or effects would appear in a recognizably human setting...[The central character's] masculine potency - which is, of course, an image of his 77-year-old creator's literary potency - scores one last success on the edge of the grave. That Mr. Garcia Marquez expects the reader to salute an ancient man's victory over a child, rather than see it as pathetic or monstrous, is the latest measure of his fiction's heroic contempt for reality."