The Love of His Life

But it will be as easy to bid her goodbye as it is for Humbert Humbert to leave Lolita; or Gustav von Aschenbach to turn his back on the boy; or Dante to ignore Beatrice. The old man cannot help himself: He dials the number again, calls the madam. He begins to live for the moment when he might actually possess the girl. He dreams, imagines, smells, tastes: And life -- against all evidence of its decrepitude -- is suddenly shot through with love.

What follows is a hallucinatory hunt -- for redemption, beatitude, rebirth. The journalist visits the heavily sedated girl again and again. He sings her songs, brings her gifts, decorates the tawdry room with paintings, reads aloud his favorite stories. And always, always, she is beautifully naked, sacredly pure, deep in slumber. Somehow, life goes on in that wayward paradise. Men die. Messages are scribbled on mirrors: " The tiger does not eat far away ," the girl scrawls on a mirror during a rare nocturnal visit to the bathroom. " Dear girl, we are alone in the world ," he writes in return.

As nights pass and he becomes addicted to the sight of her warm flanks, her bedeviling placidity, he comes to a jarring conclusion: She is the only woman he has ever loved. " Ah, me, " he concludes, paraphrasing a poem of Leopardi, " if this is love, then how it torments. " Attuned as he is to affairs of the heart, he begins to dedicate entire newspaper columns to the subject. The town sighs with comprehension. And something ancient and elemental begins to pulse through that sad and nameless Latin American city.

Like every García Márquez novel, this is a tale of obsession. But it is one so pruned, so pared, so truncated to bare essentials, that a reader will find herself turning to read every page again and again, parsing its pronunciamentos. Unlike the mesmeric novels of García Márquez's past, this one is skeletal, horned. Requiring near biblical contemplation.

And unlike One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera , it has no town full of characters, no branching tree of ancestral relations. Our old man has no relatives to speak of, no intimates. Not that he regrets it. He expects to die alone, in the bed on which he was first deposited. He is "the end of a line, without merit or brilliance, who would have nothing to leave his descendants if not for the events" of this strange little story.

And yet, though it be the chronicle of one man's head and heart, Memories has its unforgettable characters: There is Rosa Cabarcas, the ancient wench with the clear, cruel eyes of a seer; Ximena Ortiz, the jilted bride with the quick, muscled loins of a wildcat; Marco Tulio, the editor whose charms would melt the most hardened of journalists. The novel may unfold more elliptically than readers are accustomed to (the imagery is packed; the prose, beautifully translated by Edith Grossman, downright runic), but the story is classic García Márquez. Its affect is rich. Multi-tentacled. Dendriform. Full of surprise. And the grace it finally delivers is clear: This is a story of love. A man mustn't die without knowing the wonder. When that red evening comes, García Márquez seems to be saying, we are all one and the same: third-rate hacks, sniffing out love, chasing salvation. And if we don't quite reach love, there will be consolations.

That is the quarry here. That is the gift. But pointing it out will not rob you of the pleasures of finding it. When all is said and done, you'll read this book for that unmistakable sound: ever more puny, but inexhaustible.

It is the voice of Gabriel García Márquez. Still talking. ?

Marie Arana is the editor of Book World.