In today's climate, only a writer of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's stature could get away with this plot:

		"MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES" By Gabriel Garcia Marquez Knopf ($20)

On his 90th birthday, a reclusive Colombian writer orders up from his favorite madam a young virgin for a night of libertine celebration.

In Bogota, as in most places, sex with children is a crime, but our nameless narrator couldn't care less, his desire "so urgent it seemed like a message from God."

So begins what appears to be a tawdry case of hopeless lechery, but under the spell of Garcia Marquez, becomes a paean to the power of love.

The madam obliges, bringing the birthday boy a 14-year-old present, a poor girl who cares for her brothers and sisters by working long hours at a clothing factory.

When he arrives at the brothel late at night, he finds the child naked and fast asleep. Each night becomes a repeat of the first. In this fashion, their relationship proceeds, she in exhausted slumber, he chastely lying next to her.

He furnishes the cubicle with paintings, provides recordings of classical music and a new fan. He sings and reads "The Little Prince" to his sleeping beauty he names Delgadina. He falls in love.

For a man who has never been in love in any of his 90 years, sleeping with "514" women by age 50, all of whom he paid, and living alone without close friends or family, the arrival of intimacy is life-changing.

His Sunday newspaper columns in praise of love became famous; he adopts a cranky, aged Angora cat, and when Delgadina disappears, he "did not have a moment's peace. ... I spent my nights in a dazzled state," like a lovelorn teen-ager. When love arrives, at 20 or 90, it's a wonderful thing is the rather obvious message. The author of the masterpiece "A Hundred Years of Solitude" isn't offering us anything as entertaining or challenging this time, only a bauble, a sliver of his genius. Perhaps, to paraphrase another Garcia Marquez title, call this "Love in the Time of Viagra."