Garcia Marquez, What's Up?

Garcia Marquez's new book, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, according to this review in the New York Times "turns out not to have been worth the wait." Ouch. And ouch again.

It's a small book, and at 115 pages, is much shorter than The Dream Antilles. So of course, we'll read it anyway, and hope that we find some pleasure in it. But we'll wait until we're sitting on the beach in desde Desdemona, and we'll remember that we love Garcia Marquez for all he's done in the past, before we open this slender volume. That way, we know that we're reading an old friend just for pleasure, not for snarkiness, nor for analysis. Just for ourselves.

Put another way, just because an icon receives a bad review in the Times doesn't remove him from our Pantheon. To get removed, you have to commit literary high crimes and misdemeanors, not just have a work not pan out. But don't worry: the names of those we've removed aren't going to be disclosed here. We've already forgotten that they existed.