#22 by ---...--- on November 16, 2005 4:50am PT
Yes, that is never answered - that Morality is a question of time......and this is what is surprising. He is an aging dinosaur, with old age ravaging the brains leaving him with fewer neurons to think.
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#21 by ---...--- on November 16, 2005 4:48am PT
whats so awesome about this book?
Okay it tells the story of a 90 year old guy dreaming of having sex with an adolescent virgin - tell me what man has ever stopped thinking of this (never mind his age) - since virgins these days are like gold dust

But does he answer the question which he poses through Rosa that morality is a question of time - so I suppose he did do it - by the action of havong to sleep with a drugged "adoloscent" (yuckkkkk!) - drugged with a mixture of bromide and valerian, and looking "as naked and helpless as the day she was born". She’s been subjected "to a regime of hygiene and beautification" that hasn’t overlooked "even the incipient down on her pubis". According to Rosa, she’s "beautiful, clean, and well-mannered, but dying of fear because a friend of hers who ran away with a stevedore from Gayra had bled to death in two hours".

And so while he is dreaming of his coming pleasures, he recounts all the women he slept with. (All right tell me if someone does the same on FP or UP here how many would applaud him as a true he-man and how many would want to send him to a high-security psychiatric loony bin - be truthful). this is a contrived way to setting up his sagging imagination to write his news paper column - yeah lets do some love letters to all the women I screwed around with - use them as my columns. Now I need a framework for this. The story is all there - Goody me the great Garcia Marquez will write a novella now!

Nothing new in what Marquez had done. He has rehashed the Voltairean saying "One of the superstitions of man’s mind, is to imagine that virginity might be a virtue."

Naah! the book doesnot really deserve the accolades being given to it on this thread.
If it does, then pray please tell me all about it. I mean, come Marquez is an old hand, and knows how to play the game. Set up the story, the framework etc and do it with a certain panache. Unfortuantely this book is lacking in all of this, it comes across as being very tired and not at all like his other more prominent works.