Gabriel Garcia Marquez may have invented magical realism, a writing style that stresses realism in language to the extent that images become amplified, perhaps stretched, or recoloured. The resulting hyper-reality can be seen by some readers as dream-like or exaggerated, when it merely reflects an enhanced sensitivity of awareness. The effect on the reader can be astounding, arresting, like free association with imagination nailed to the spot of the present. If such a reader is convinced, the feeling is that of being incorporated into the events, drawn in, albeit passively, into an experience that is involving and constantly surprising. There can, however, be challenges with experience that “takes you there”, rather than relates or describes in a more detached way.
In his novel, Memorias de mis putas tristes, Gabriel
Garcia Marquez seems, at first glance, to have applied this stylistic technique
to the book’s scenario, itself. A reader is immediately plunged into a place
they might have thought they would never go and, if one is to experience this
story, one has to remain in that role for the duration, which, in the case of
this book, is not very long.
We meet a journalist. We experience life from his
perspective, very much from within his experience. His perspective throughout
is that we are sharing this life, living it alongside his old age and we
suddenly seem to know him well. He is just turning ninety years old: this we
know. His mind, clearly, remains acute: this, also, we know from the start. We
also realise that he must still be in possession of other faculties that might
have burned out in a man of his age, because he announces early on that he is
about to celebrate his achievement of another decade by paying to deflower a
fourteen-year-old girl. Arrangements are ongoing. The girl needs the money, at
least her family does. It seems she, herself, does not expect to profit, though
clearly others will. It’s a business arrangement, no more, no less. And hence,
we the readers, are “being taken there”.
But, for the first time in his long life, the old man
finds himself in love. At ninety, and in circumstances where the transaction
was to be no more than contractual, he finds himself involved, emotionally as
well as physically. He begins to imagine a permanence in this relationship, a
permanence that would begin at the age of ninety.
We learn a little of the journalist’s past and his
professional status. We learn more of the present social conditions of the town
where he lives. But this is not a long, analytical novel. On the contrary, it
is short, more of a short story, and so we find that we do not have to inhabit
this persona for many pages. But the experience is revealing and not a little
moving.
As to meaning? Interpretation? The reality that
presents itself demands our free association remains rooted to the
protagonist’s spot. We have no choice. This is not me, the reader, but
magically a reader of this novel shares a vivid reality that probably would
never have been imagined.
