Memories of My Melancholy Whores

The publishers of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez´s new book said Friday they were moving up its release date by a week because pirated versions are already being sold on the streets of Bogota.

"We´re going to start selling them Wednesday because of the pirates," said Moises Melo, editor of publishing house Norma de Colombia, which has printed 350,000 copies of the novel to sell in Colombia and neighbouring countries. The book called Memoria de Mis Putas Tristes, or Memories of My Melancholy Whores, is the Colombian author´s first novel in more than a decade.  Melo said pirate publishers must have stolen a copy of the new novel from a delivery truck. Street vendors on Thursday began peddling the pirated version at traffic lights in this Andean capital.  Melo said he´s confident that "no more than a couple hundred were being sold" on Bogota streets and that a quick police crackdown would halt the pirated sales altogether. He said the novel will be sold in Colombian bookstores for about $10 US. The pirate copies were fetching about $5 US on street corners.   While Garcia Marquez´s previous books have all been pirated, Melo said this is the first time the illegal copies hit the streets before the official versions came out.

“In my ninetieth year, I decided to give myself the gift of a night of love with a young virgin.”  An elderly journalist decides to celebrate his 90 years in a grand way, giving himself a present that will make him feel like he’s still alive: a virgin. In the brothel of a picturesque town, he sees the young woman from the back, completely naked, and his life changes radically. Now that he meets her he finds himself close to dying, not of old age, but rather of love. Memoria de mis putas tristes is the story of this eccentric, solitary old man, a narrative of his sexual adventures (of which there were many), for which he always paid, never imagining that this would be the way he would discover true love.  This new novel, written in Gabriel García Márquez’s incomparable style movingly, contemplates the misfortunes of old age and celebrates the joys of being in love.

More than $100 million US in pirated videos, DVDs, CDs and books were sold in Colombia last year and accounted for more than half of all sales of these products, according to the Washington-based International Intellectual Property Alliance.