A short, 96-page novella of a ninety-year old columnist reflecting on his life and sexual powers as he prepares for a rather special night of paid-for sex. By the time he was fifty he had slept with 514 such women, after that he stopped listing them for the quantity dwindled and he could remember each without referring to paper. I had suspected this short work might have been a catalogue of sexual encounters which, in his exquisite prose, could not become repetitive as some sex memoirs do, but no, what Marquez has done is touch the nerve of old age. It is beautiful.
Comparison: Paulo Coelho, Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel.
Similar this month: Haruki Murakami.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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