Cape £10 pp115

It is 10 years since Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the standard-bearer of magical realism, produced a novel and 17 years since the last great flowering of his lush imagination in Love in the Time of Cholera. Following the publication of his 1995 novel Love and Other Demons, there has been a work of literary journalism (News of a Kidnapping) and a memoir (Living to Tell the Tale). But no fiction. Those anxious about the 78-year-old Colombian Nobel laureate’s continued vigour as a fiction writer will not have their anxieties allayed by his new novel. In size, style and subject matter, this is a work suffused with a sense of exhaustion.

The book — at 115 pages more of a novella than a novel (its publisher calls it a fairy tale for the aged) — begins energetically enough with a statement of intent from the unnamed narrator: “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” A mediocre journalist of “exemplary ugliness” who lives alone in the husk of his parents’ house, he is a man who claims never to have known true love. “I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn’t pay,” he confesses with tart pride.

Love rather than Latin America’s messy politics has increasingly come to dominate Garcia Marquez’s fiction (the latter is barely nodded to here), and it is love’s transformative and redemptive powers that he returns to in Memories of My Melancholy Whores. Arranging with “the owner of an illicit house” for a suitable young virgin to be found, the old journalist dresses for his promised tryst with fastidious care. Finding the 14-year-old girl naked and drugged (from nervousness), he undresses with equal fastidiousness, then loses his nerve and spends the night lying meekly by her side. Inevitably, after repeated visits, always with the same result, he becomes smitten by her. Just as inevitably, his life (and writing) is reinvigorated by what he calls his “adolescent’s pain”.

The central scenes between the narrator and the sleeping girl (whom he has dubbed Delgadina) contain much the most pungent prose in the novel. As he is leaving her after that first night, the journalist glimpses the girl “in the conciliatory light of dawn . . . her arms opened in a cross, absolute mistress of her virginity”; later, at their second meeting, she half-turns in bed, revealing what he fears is “a pool of blood the size and shape of her body” (it is, in fact, perspiration). The journalist becomes transfixed by visions of her, and finds she feels more real in his dreams than in real life. When one night she mumbles in her sleep, he notices that “her voice had a plebeian touch . . . I preferred her asleep”.

Compared to such rich and suggestive ambivalence, much of the rest of the novel has a strangely sketched-in feel. A dramatic storm after one amorous encounter passes with barely a rhetorical flourish; the frequent references to music rarely raise the pulse. Bald statements that feel like “notes towards” are allowed to stand (“I hung up the phone, filled with a sense of liberation I hadn’t know before in my life”). Occasionally, we gain glimpses of a richer Garcia Marquez idiom more familiar to readers of his earlier work — there are descriptions of the journalist typing with “a hen’s arduous pecking”, or an ocean liner emitting a “doleful bull’s bellow” — but such lively flourishes are rare.

Most curious of all are the unenlightening aphorisms that litter the book (“Inspiration gives no warning”, “The bolero is life”, “Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love”) and Garcia Marquez’s uncertain hold on one of his other main themes, old age. The observation that “Among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission ” may be astute; the remark that “Age is not how old you are but how old you feel” most certainly is not. Such unsteadiness is sadly typical of the book as a whole.

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