The Dying Animal

By Michael Wood

This article appeared in the December 5, 2005 edition of The Nation.

November 17, 2005

There was a certain amount of confusion among the fans and celebrity watchers when this new novella by Gabriel García Márquez appeared in Spanish. He had just published the first volume of his autobiography and was supposed to be working on a second. Was this it? The title included the word memoria, which can mean "memoir" just as easily as it can mean "memory." The book was written in the first person, and it was about an elderly Latin American writer. But then the differences, on inspection, began to overtake the similarities. The writer in the novella is not a novelist; he doesn't live in Mexico City but in an unnamed Colombian port that has all the signs of being Barranquilla (where the young García Márquez attended boarding school and later worked as a journalist). And he is not just elderly but old; he turns 90 in the course of the story. García Márquez, by contrast, at 77 (when the Spanish version was published last year), is a mere juvenile.

But the confusion has a critical interest, because the autobiography had plenty of fiction in it, in the shape of apocryphal stories, characters recognizable from the novels and indeed whole passages quoted verbatim from One Hundred Years of Solitude. The implication was not that the autobiography was untrue but that García Márquez himself had lived among the scenery and personnel of his fictional work and that much of what he experienced as life was already fictionalized. There are stories, he says, that are not invented on paper: "Life invents them." Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an exploration of old age and desire, and life certainly invented most of the stories we tell about both of them.

Informed by a doctor that the pain he has is natural for his age (he is 42 at the time), the writer in the novella says, "In that case...what isn't natural is my age." The doctor gives him a pitying smile and says, "I see that you're a philosopher." In one of the story's many expert plays on identical or closely related words, the writer tells us this "was the first time I thought about my age in terms of being old." Every age, even the lowest, has to do with being old. The question is: how old? Or how far from death? Curiously, when the writer uses the phrase "my true distance from death," he means almost no distance at all. Happily, he gets a breather; and by the end of the book, since he now counts in decades rather than years, he is looking forward to dying "any day after my hundredth birthday."

Subscriber Login

4 ISSUES FREE

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

.

About Michael Wood

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University. His most recent book is Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge). more...
Most Read

Issues »

Most Emailed

Issues »

Popular Topics

Blogs

» The Dreyfuss Report

Openings for US-Iran Deal? | Khatami may run again, gets international backing. And Ahmadinejad is besieged, challenged.
Robert Dreyfuss
Posted 44 minutes ago

» Campaign 08

The Conservative Crack-Up (And Crackpots) | With their ideas plummeting, conservatives resort to ludicrous conspiracy theories against Barack Obama.
Ari Berman
Posted at 12:21 EST

» The Beat

A Phrase for Obama: "The McCain-Bush Economy" | 90 percent say country's on the wrong track, Bush's approval lowest ever and the it really is the economy, stupid.
John Nichols
Posted at 11:44 EST

» Capitolism

The Right's Response to the Bailout | Prayers and protests on Capitol Hill
Christopher Hayes
Posted at 11:08 EST

» Editor's Cut

The Woman Greenspan, Rubin & Summers Silenced | How Brooksley Born might have helped us avert this financial meltdown
Katrina vanden Heuvel

» The Notion

Is the Second Superpower of the Cold War Going Down? | The Soviets were bankrupted by an Afghan War that wouldn’t end. Now, is it our turn?
Tom Engelhardt

» Act Now!

S. Dakota Goes After Choice (Again) | Meet the Rev. Steve Hickey. He believes that S. Dakota has been chosen by God to upend Roe v. Wade.
Peter Rothberg

» And Another Thing

Are You the Very Model of a Modern Vice-President? | Sarah's not the only one with a special skill.
Katha Pollitt