A YEAR AGO THIS MONTH in Medellín, Colombia, street vendors were hammering on car windscreens offering pirated copies of Gabriel García Márquez’s first fiction for a decade at half-price. Meanwhile, Random House Mondadori was about to release the official version of Memoria de Mis Putas Tristes, with an initial print run of one million copies for Latin America and Spain. In the English-speaking world, there is no novelist of equivalent stature.

García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982 and is widely revered in Colombia as the bright hope of a country that civil war and drug barons have bled to death. He began his career as a journalist in 1954, writing fiction on the side, and this is how he still characterises himself. Love and power have been his subjects for half a century: Love in the Time of Cholera; The General in his Labyrinth; Love and Other Demons, to name three of his masterpieces. Now aged 77, can he have anything fresh to offer?

In the new novel, love has metamorphosed again. An earlier novella carried the epigraph: “The pursuit of love is like falconry.” But in this book — beautifully translated by Edith Grossman as Memories of My Melancholy Whores — García Márquez depicts a respected journalist, breaking the rules of a lifetime to fall madly, anarchically, transgressively in love with a 14-year-old girl on the eve of his 90th birthday. More like shipwreck than falconry.

The story begins with the unnamed newspaper columnist in an unnamed Colombian city telephoning his old friend, Rosa Cabarcas, to see if she can arrange an adolescent virgin for him to spend the night with in celebration of his birthday. “What are you trying to prove?” the brothel madam asks in alarm. Nevertheless, she organises everything within a few hours: life is cheap, pleasure only slightly more expensive, in the violent impoverished city.

The columnist arrives after 10pm, dressed as a dandy in white linen, trouser-cuffs turned up to disguise how much he has shrunk in recent years, sweating with fear. The girl, tartily made-up and naked on the bed for hire, is deeply asleep. She has worked all day sewing on buttons in a clothing factory; she has fed and put to bed her younger siblings; she has traipsed across the city; and Rosa Cabarcas has drugged her with a mixture of bromide and valerian to calm her nerves. Out of this sordid scenario, Garcia Márquez spins a fairytale, borrowing from Pygmalion and Sleeping Beauty.

The girl never wakes up, nothing overtly sexual occurs, but love strikes him like a freak storm. Back at home in the house where he was born, and where both his parents died, rain pours in through the plaster cracks:

“Then a phantasmal flash of lightning and a simultaneous clap of thunder saturated the air with a strong sulphur odour, the wind destroyed the balcony’s window panes, and the awful sea squall broke the locks and came inside the house.”

Afterwards the columnist imagines the girl he names Delgadina awake and helping him to set his house in order. Love for her disrupts his memories of other women — his mother, the bride he jilted, friends, servants and prostitutes he paid for sex. Drifting, dreamlike through the detritus of a life ripped apart, he reappraises his relations with the opposite sex, acknowledges and makes peace with all the tawdry exploitation that there has been: “My delirium was so great that during a student demonstration complete with rocks and bottles, I had to make an enormous effort not to lead it as I held up a sign that would sanctify my truth: I am mad with love.”

The journalist in García Márquez counters the sentimentality of this fantastic story, with his sharp eye for the telling details of everyday life. One night a politically important client is murdered in the brothel and the columnist observes: “The enormous corpse, naked but with shoes on, had the pallor of steamed chicken in the blood-soaked bed.” Afterwards he remarks rancorously to Rosa Cabarcas: “You’re the only liberal with power in this government.

” An attempt to report the killing in the press is thwarted by the censor — the Abominable No-Man — and the columnist is left to purify his conscience “with a scowl of mourning at the most cynical and well-attended funeral of the century”.

Cynicism extends beyond politics to pervade even love. One night the columnist hears his Delgadina talking in her sleep and thinks that she is about to wake: “That was when the last shadow of a doubt disappeared from my soul: I preferred her asleep.”

Magic and cynicism, love and power, corruption and redemption: these abrasive pairings are hallmarks of the magic realism that García Márquez is famous for pioneering. Yet his voice is never genre-bound or predictable. There is not in this slender book one stale sentence, redundant word or unfinished thought: something worth banging on windscreens about, even in London.

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