Source: Guardian
Nobel prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez is suffering from senile dementia and can no longer write. […] Apparently he is no longer in a condition to write the second part of his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale. His last novel, Memoirs of My Melancholy Whores, published five years ago, received mixed reviews.
However, I very much liked it. In that book, he wrote: ”It is a triumph of life that old people lose their memories of inessential things, though memory does not often fail with regard to things that are of real interest to us.” On the eve of the 90th birthday of the narrator, a journalist and columnist for a local newspaper, is feeling close to death. As a birthday present to himself, he pays for a night with a 14-year old virgin prostitute. The night does not quite turn out the way he expected, but he eventually reaches another unexpected type of bliss. The book is ~120 pages short; it made me laugh and sad. I am very sorry to read about his dementia that is now effectively ending his writing career.
Here’s a very personal account about dementia with references to Gabo.