Obsession of My Melancholy Whore

The title of each book by (the Latin American author) Gabriel Garcia Marquez is interesting, be it "One hundred years of solitude" or "Living to tell the tale". But his latest book, the first fiction in a decade, is entitled, "Memories of my melancholy whores". As someone waiting eagerly to read the book soon, I've gone through some of the reviews of this book, one of which is reproduced below:

(Editorial Reviews: From Publishers Weekly)

"García Márquez's slim, reflective contribution to the romance of the brothel, his first book-length fiction in a decade, is narrated by perhaps the greatest connoisseur ever of girls for hire. After a lifetime spent in the arms of prostitutes (514 when he loses count at age 50), the unnamed journalist protagonist decides that his gift to himself on his 90th birthday will be a night with an adolescent virgin. But age, followed by the unexpected blossoming of love, disrupts his plans, and he finds himself wooing the allotted 14-year-old in silence for a year, sitting beside her as she sleeps and contemplating a life idly spent. Flashes of García Márquez's brilliant imagery—the sleeping girl is "drenched in phosphorescent perspiration"—illuminate the novella, and there are striking insights into the euphoria that is the flip side of the fear of death. The narrator's wit and charm, however, are not enough to counterbalance the monotony of his aimlessness. Though enough grace notes are struck to produce echoes of eloquence, this flatness keeps the memories as melancholy as the women themselves. 250,000 first printing." (Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

The number 514, mentioned above, intrigued me, because Marquez often seems to put a very huge number when it comes to one's extent of sexual escapades. Of course, this is not the only thing that he exaggerates; another example is the length of hair of the central character in, "Of love and other demons", which he puts at 200 feet.

But what seems more intriguing to me is his obsession with whores. For example, Florentino Ariza, his principla character from "One hundred years of solitude", who had vowed to remain chaste for Farmina Daza, his lost love, learned the basics of sex from a whore, and by the time he meets Daza (after 53 years 7 months and 11 days!), he had slept with, if I remember correctly, 626 women. And true to his form, he lies to Farmina that he had kept himself virgin for her all along.

In the first part of his autobiography, "Living to tell the tale", Marquez chronicles his initiation to sex by a whore, to whom he had gone to collect the rent on behalf of his father. And now in this book, "Mwemories of my melancholy whores" , he puts the number of whores his character slept with at 514! And this coming from a person, who has remained married to the same woman for 47 years!

I just wonder, if this is the fantasy of a shy, awkward, bookish teen, who may or my not have been initiated to sex by a prostitute, or the guilt of a man who really led a very promiscus life until he met the woman of his life and married her, when he was already 30 years old?

But then, when it's Gabo, how can one differentiate the fact from the fantasy?
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