Sublime Folly

...He calls her Delgadina and hushes Rosa when she tries to correct him with the child's real name...

...Former world leaders, convicted serial killers, disgraced celebrities and tycoons, invented monsters such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita—they all solicit sympathy or at least empathy, the recognition that they did what they did either because they thought it was right or because their pasts dictated their choices...

...he screams, assuming she has used her time off attracting other customers...

...He doesn't mind that she is always inert and unconscious when he pays his nightly calls on her...

...The brothel eventually reopens, and the narrator once again finds his Delgadina asleep and decked out for his arrival, this time in unfamiliar jewelry and makeup...

...The narrator escapes the fate that has been decreed for him by the expedient means of simply not appearing at the church at the appointed hour...

...For when the narrator secures from Rosa Carbacas, a madam whom he has long patronized, the prize he seeks on the eve of his 90th birthday, he finds in the brothel bedroom a sleeping girl, just turned 14, and almost immediately falls in love with her...

...It requires little effort to make of this situation a classic feminist parable, featuring the male objectification of the female body and the attendant refusal to grant that object of desire an independent existence...

...He recalls how exuberantly his Italian mother pampered him, her only child, going so far as to pay a newspaper, surreptitiously, to print her son's juvenile essays, thus setting him on the path of his journalism career...

...He sums up his professional life by judging himself "a mediocre journalist" and "a favorite of caricaturists because of my exemplary ugliness...

...Thus observed by a socially acceptable man, the young woman decided that marriage would be the appropriate next step...

...He makes most of the other outward details of his long existence perfectly clear...

...The narrative is toned down, appropriately so, since it is provided by a nonagenarian...

...He never tries to explain why his life has been "wasted...

...No matter how piggish and chauvinistic the impulses behind the narrator's infatuation may be, it is enchanting to see them in full comic flower...

...As for a thwarted past love, the narrator insists he has felt no love at all: "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay, and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take the money even if they threw it in the trash...

...He stumbled by accident into the wrong room of a house he was visiting and saw Ximena Ortiz, a daughter of his hosts, reclining naked on a bed...

...Here he is, at age 90, in the throes of new passion: "1 floated among erratic clouds and talked to myself in front of the mirror in the vain hope of confirming who I was...

...I, the agreeable fiance, learned to crochet with her, and in this way we passed the useless hours until the wedding: I crocheted little blue booties for boys and she crocheted pink ones for girls, we'd see who guessed right, until there were enough for more than 50 babies...

...It is preposterous but well worth waiting for, as is this novel by one of the world's greatest living authors...

...it features a cast of one, with a couple of walk-ons, as opposed to hundreds...

...But fiction, in the hands of a master, can accommodate a spectrum of nuances that polemics, however right-minded, deem irrelevant...

...contributor, New York "Times Book Review" "THE year I turned 90, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin...

...Rosa has told him that the girl works all day sewing on buttons and has been sedated with bromide and valerian because she fears the after-effects of her anticipated deflowering...

...I'm ugly, shy and anachronistic," he announces...

...It covers a period of a single year rather than a century...

...They are hard to miss in this short, stripped-down novel...

...His former bride-to-be leaves the country the same day, and the scandal does him no lasting harm...

...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: ? am mad with love.'" When a murder at Rosa's brothel forces the establishment to close, the old man loses touch with his Delgadina and searches the city for her, even though he knows that he would almost certainly not recognize her clothed and awake...

...His strenuous erotic adventures have been waged almost exclusively in local brothels, where, he confides, in a rare burst of boasting, he was three times named "client of the year...

...The narrator is unnamed (a burden to reviewers, who must come up with fussy identifying circumlocutions, such as "the narrator...

...Indeed, such an interpretation seems inescapable...

...The old man's one former venture into a conventional romantic involvement resulted in a fiasco...

...He has spent his life in a South American city, also unnamed but clearly in Garcia Marquez' native Colombia...

...After graduating from college, he says, he taught Spanish and Latin in public secondary schools: "I was a poor teacher, with no training, no vocation, and no pity at all for those poor children who attended school as the easiest way to escape the tyranny of their parents...

...He reverts to old habits: "In an act of madness, I crocheted 12 pairs of blue and pink infant's booties in three days, trying to give myself the courage not to hear or sing or think about the songs that reminded me of her...

...This moment of sublime folly is topped by another development as the story comes to an end...

...Set beside One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970), the author's most renowned book, the new work looks decidedly sparse and subdued...

...He offers no childhood trauma, no tragically aborted early romance in exculpation of his solitary, loveless history...

...Most first-person accounts, autobiographical or fictional, betray an attempt at self-justification...

...As for the career that followed: "For 40 years I was the cable editor at El Diaro de La Paz, which meant reconstructing and completing in indigenous prose the news of the world that we caught as it flew through sidereal space on short waves or in Morse code...

...So munificent are Garcia Marquez' gifts that his skills at comedy tend to be overlooked...

...That is not, most refreshingly, the case with Garcia Marquez' dirty old man...

...Thus begins Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the 1982 Nobel Laureate's first work of fiction in lOyears...

...What remains is the peculiar Garcia Marquez magic...

...He lives in the house he inherited from his parents and sleeps in the bed in which he was born and plans to die...

...He may have jettisoned all the elaborate machinery and exotic props of his earlier novels, but he shows just how many tricks he canperform using only a magnificently foolish old man standing alone on a stage fading to black...

...the exfoliating energy and exuberance of Solitude and such other Garcia Marquez triumphs as Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1982) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1988) are largely missing...

...He continues to write a Sunday column for the paper, as he has for 50 years...

...On one occasion he hears Delgadina utter some nonsense phrase while dreaming, notes the "plebeian touch" in her voice, and concludes: "I preferred her asleep.' As he sits on the bed with her, stroking her bare, recumbent body, he marvels that Delgadina "seemed less real to me than in my memory...

...Her intended remembers, "After two months of being engaged we had nothing left to talk about, and without saying anything she brought up the subject of children by crocheting little boots for newborns from raw wool...