Inspiration

I just finished Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and didn't like it very much. It was my very first Marquez experience, and since I heard this book wasn't the best of him, I'll probably try something else, maybe One Hundred Years of Solitude.

What this book did was make me wonder about the meaning of the word "inspiration."

In the winter when I went back to Japan and was looking for some good Japanese books to read, I remembered a friend of mine talking about Yasunari Kawabata's short story, House of the Sleeping Beauties. The way she talked about it, it seemed like really a sensual, good story, so I bought the paperback, read it and loved it. I read it slowly, indulging in such powerful and beautiful sensuality of Kawabata's writing--yup, it was all about indulgence.

So I was very thrilled when, after finishing the story, I learned Marquez wrote a novella "inspired by House of the Sleeping Beauties" and it just came out. I'd always been told Marquez was a wonderful writer--and I do think he is--so the fact one wonderful writer wrote something inspired by a story I really loved was very exciting.

But, as I said, I didn't like the book as much as I did the story by Kawabata. I could see some of the things Marquez must've gotten from Kawabata; the main idea of an old guy spending nights with a sleeping beautiful girl; the description of the sleeing girls, the sourness of her breath; sexuality and the approach of death at the old age. I was disappointed, though, because while it felt "similar," what was in the center felt so different. It didn't have much of what I really liked about Kawabata's story. It felt more sentimental and beautifying love too much.

Of course, it should be different. It's by a different author, and after all if it weren't different it'd be pretty problematic. But when you say you were "inspired," I would imagine you have been inspired by something to the core of the work, which seemed lacking in Melancholy Whores--then again the core of the work could be different for different people?