The new García Márquez novel

Economist.com | Love at the age of cholera: "“FOR my 90th birthday,” Gabriel García Márquez's first work of fiction in ten years begins, “I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin.” With such a promising start, and coming two years after the first volume of his memoirs, one might well have expected “A Memoir of My Sad Whores” to be a semi-autobiographical accounting of a life spent in brothels.

For the Spanish-speaking world it has been the literary event of the decade. The initial print run was 1m copies, of which 400,000 were sold in the first week. In the author's native Colombia, the slim volume was published under security measures more fitting for a trove of pre-Columbian gold, including 24-hour video surveillance and the constant weighing of the books' storage boxes, to prevent an advance copy from escaping—and pirate prints still appeared on the streets of Bogotá (albeit with four pages missing) a week before the launch.

Even so, the novel is not about whores, although its narrator and protagonist in 1950s Colombia has paid every one of the more than 500 women he has slept with. No, it is about romance. Feeling suddenly mortal, the old curmudgeon decides to accept the depraved offer made many years before by his longtime madam. Unexpectedly, the 14-year-old that she procures becomes the love of his life. Yet he never violates her chastity, nor so much as talks to her. Each night she is so tired from the sweatshop, and so heavily dosed with valerian, that all he can do is watch her slumber while he wrestles with the legacies of nine decades spent in solitude."