"What does a woman think about while she attaches a button?"

"I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth, because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone, you dress and perfume yourself for someone, and I'd never had anyone to do that for."

Filthy in the most beautiful sense of the word. "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's debut novel in over a decade of selfish hibernation. I've never felt more privileged to have read a story in all my years of reading. Marquez's words are like an invite. He draws in the reader in such a way as to suggest that the story is a product of the reader's own making, that that Marquez is just a guide in our own fight for self discovery.

In this modern day Lollita (although to call it that, or even make so absurd a suggestion is to do it a great injustice) Marquez crafts our narrarator, a ninety year old writer who lives with the health and effectiveness of a 7o year old. However, it isn't until he falls in love for the first time that he begins to exhibit the vivaciousness and restored agility of said 70 year old. He finds love in one Delgadina, who he prefers to speak silently, and in this we see age as something other than the sum of time. Marquez doesn't fall prey to convenient recollection or remorse or regret. He also doesn't herald old age as a glass half full proposition. Instead he narrates life for what it is. Here. Now. This moment in June. Our character dances blindly and gropes cowardly. I feel throughout everything that Marquez simply allows the character to be instead of basing the character in bias. In the end the reader is unsure of the outcome but certain of the income. The prose is so perfectly positioned. With sparse dialogue, and enriching self reflection on the part of the narrarator, Marquez dazzles the reader with his delicate diction and assured prose.

"I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license. That afternoon, back home again without the cat and without her, I proved that it was not only possible but that I myself, an old man without anyone, was dying of love. But I also realized that the contrary was true as well: I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world. I had spent more than fifteen years trying to translate the poems of Leopardi, and only on that afternoon did I have a profound sense of them: Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments."

This novel restored my belief in love.

4 out of 4 Hula hoops. I'm dizzy from all the ecstatic spinning.