#Friday56 & #BookBeginnings: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

For Book Beginnings:

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a wild night of love with an adolescent virgin. 

- p. 3

For Friday 56:

I dressed in haste, without washing, and only then did I see the sentence written in lipstick across the mirror above the sink: The tiger does not eat far away. I knew it hadn't been there the night before, and no one could have come into the room, and therefore I understood it as a gift from the devil. 

- p. 56

Synopsis of Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit--he has purchased hundreds of women--he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known.

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After a ten year hiatus, Marquez came back with this extremely slim Lolita-esque novel. I've got a copy which I plan on rereading and reviewing for this year's Read the Nobels. Does this book intrigue you?

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