Memories of My Literary Whores
Random Act: I bought me some suspenders today.
Also, I just finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores. It is a short gem of a read - only 115 pages - and each page is a solid 100 words. That amounts to 11500 words: a shy short of an undergraduate thesis. But in those pages Marquez has led me by his lyrical writing into a world I wish I was born into.
I don’t think I’m that well-read to be a good critic on anything. The really great critics rarely find a fault with the things that they consume: they love what they do too much that a single, appropriate phrase is all that is needed to redeem everything else. I have yet to get to that stage.
In reading Marquez however, I am both happy and sad. Happy: because to have read something so lovely is really one of life’s simplest pleasures. Sad: because in 11500 words he has put to shame everything I’ve written so far. Like Salieri realizing that his entire concerto has been diminished by a single Mozart motif.
Both make me want to write better.
