“FOR my 90th birthday,” Gabriel García Márquez's first work of
fiction in ten years begins, “I wanted to give myself the gift
of a night of mad love with an adolescent virgin.” With such a
promising start, and coming two years after the first volume of
his memoirs, one might well have expected “A Memoir of My Sad
Whores” to be a semi-autobiographical accounting of a life spent
in brothels.  For the Spanish-speaking world it has been the
literary event of the decade. The initial print run was 1m
copies, of which 400,000 were sold in the first week. In the
author's native Colombia, the slim volume was published under
security measures more fitting for a trove of pre-Columbian
gold, including 24-hour video surveillance and the constant
weighing of the books' storage boxes, to prevent an advance copy
from escaping—and pirate prints still appeared on the streets of
Bogotá (albeit with four pages missing) a week before the
launch.  Even so, the novel is not about whores, although its
narrator and protagonist in 195