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Some say age is of the mind while others say it is a dictation of the body. Edith Grossman’s translation of Garcia Garcia Marquez’s ‘Memories of My Melancholy Whores’ is a revelation of the roles played by both the mind and the body in the definition of age. The author plays on a lot of themes: time and seasons; love and sex; and the power of choice and chance.

The story centers on a bachelor who wants to mark his ninetieth birthday in a sexually remarkable manner-sex with a young virgin. On the eve of his birthday, he contacts Rosa Cabarcas who had earlier helped to ‘purchase’ hundreds of women. Cabarcas gets him a fourteen-year-old girl who enchants him. Narrated in the first person narrative style, the novel almost seems biographical; the narrator’s name is never mentioned as he is only identified with the pronoun “I”.

Commodification and muteness are features that are affixed to womanhood; the general outlook is that females do not deserve a voice. Cabarcas, the only woman who has a voice, has a questionable reputation as she ‘sells’ and ‘rents out’ women to marauding men. Delgadina, the innocent virgin that falls prey to the ‘cunny claws’ of a nonagenarian, has no control over the situation. This is an indication that the rights of women get dashed, mostly with the aiding and abetting of other women. The general portrayal of womanhood is further worsened because the only place where Delgadina is really active is in the hallucinating mind of the narrator. One is then bound to wonder how love can flourish in this one-sidedness.

It may not be a crime to be a bachelor at ninety but it certainly is a crime to diminish the ‘sanctity’ of womanhood. The narrator, in his escapades, takes track of the number of women he has gone to bed with. He says, “By the time I was fifty, there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once.” He reels them off, one after the other, like items off a shopping list. His tone is condescending. Of course, some of these women are prostitutes. The fact that the economy does not treat men and women equally is one of the reasons. This explains the fate that befalls Delgadina as a result of the heap of responsibility that life burdens her with.

It is of the essence to know the genesis of the narrator’s obsession. It began at the tender age of twelve when he first caught the sight of nude women. This should send quivers down the spine of parents and guardians. They should properly control what their children and wards are exposed to their most impressionable ages.

The narration has a handful of vulgar terms and lewd expressions that may render the book like the DH Lawrence’s unedited ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ Had ‘Memories of My Melancholy Whores’ been published in the medieval age, both the book and its author would have come under serious sanction. A Persian edition of the book was banned in Iran. However, the translation deserves commendation because it does not glorify obscurantism.

There is the need for everyone to know that the world of today has largely broken away from the norm that accords only men significance. Today, the society, by and large, equates men and women. Therefore, literature should strive to always depict a world where beside (not behind) every successful man, there is the woman.