The late Colombian author’s ‘lost’ last fiction about a middle-aged woman’s erotic trysts is a breezy romp of modest ambition
his book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” Not a one-star rant from the bowels of Amazon or Goodreads, but rather the verdict of Colombian Nobel laureateThe erotic adventures of a middle-aged mother, it was originally conceived as a five-part narrative more than 600 pages long, but was set aside so Márquez could finish, by which time he had lived with dementia for 10 years, he revisited it in a race between “perfectionism and his vanishing mental facilities”, his sons’ foreword tells us.
An editorial afterword explains how the intimate, decidedly non-epic entertainment now before us – a brisk and frisky tale of extramarital sex doubling as a parable of parental inscrutability – was sewn together from Márquez’s fifth draft and a document preserving offcuts from prior attempts.
Most agonising of all for Ana Magdalena is her first, unrepeatably thrilling hook-up with a man who cheapens the memory with his parting gift of a $20 bill. If she cringes, sometimes the reader does, too. By page three, Márquez has her gazing at her own breasts ; soon she’s reaching hungrily for what he calls her lover’s “resting creature”. Another partner gives her “a supernatural pleasure that left her threshed and burning” .
Her infidelity isn’t a psychologically complex sating of unmet appetites so much as a way to plug the book into the mainsthis is not: Ana Magdalena’s infidelity isn’t a psychologically complex sating of unmet appetites so much as a way to just plug the book into the mains. When we’re told that she and her husband, an orchestra conductor, make “reckless love...
The same goes for the moment when Ana Magdalena discovers that one of her lovers is a murderous sex predator, or the passage in which – having guiltily prodded her husband to own up to a betrayal of his own – she longs to kill him as well as his lover, “not with a merciful gunshot, but by carving them up bit by bit into transparent slices with a meat guillotine”.kind of novel either.