De bellas durmientes y putas tristes

Resumen

No secret: Gabriel García Márquez was paying homage to Yasunari Kawabata in his 2004 novel Memories of My Sad Whores. This essay discusses the differences and the connecting points between García Márquez’s short novel and Kawabata’s The House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961). By means of an exercise in comparative literature, the essay explores the psychology of the main characters, the way they confront old age and solitude, the role of the narrators and, above all, how the main characters try to give a meaning to existence. Little by little, the paper makes clear that the surface similitudes existing between the two novels reveal profound differences in their deep meaning. A final evaluation detects in García Márquez a too pleasant lightness contrasting with the dark pessimism of the Japanese author.