Some would argue that world-renowned writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the patriarch of the Latin American family literary tree. And with novels such as 100 Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera, his place is certainly cemented in the global literature canon. Yet the recent release of his latest novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, has met with disappointment.
Alberto Manguel, literary critic for The Guardian and a staunch Marquez supporter in the past, noted in his review of the novel (tellingly entitled ‘A Sad Affair‘ that Marquez “allowed his old Charon (the novel’s central character) to forget, and the resulting memories are not melancholy, not even sad, but merely pitiful and disappointing”.
