Strange Pilgrims

‘’A continent conceived by the scum of the earth without a moment of love: the children of abductions, rapes, violations, infamous dealings, deceptions, the union of enemies with enemies.’’

Father of Magical Realism, a true god of Literature, one of the immortals. Gabriel Garcia Márquez doesn’t need introductions. He is the writer who drew my attention to Latin American Literature. Through his work, I fell in love with Colombia, its culture and traditions, with the rich literary world of Central and South America. This collection is one more example of the impact and wonder of his writing.

12 stories. 12 pilgrims whose life led them away from their homelands into the old, safe arms of Europe. But is it so? Can you ever truly show more leave your birthplace behind? The answer is ‘’no’’. It is in your blood, your thoughts, your behaviour. It haunts your steps, it doesn’t let go...It doesn’t matter whether you are in Paris, Geneva, Madrid, Barcelona, Naples, Sicily, Rome. Your land is inside you. Everything else is only a pilgrimage…

Bon Voyage, Mr. President: A young couple befriends the exiled President of an unnamed Carribean country. Initially their purpose isn’t exactly honest but what happens when he actually manages to gain their sympathy? Set in Barcelona.

‘’No one sang or died of love in the plastic trattories on the Piazza di Spagna. For the Rome of our memory was by now another ancient Rome within the ancient Rome of the Caesars. Then a voice that might have come from the beyond stopped me cold on a narrow street in Trastevere. ‘’Hello, Poet’’.

The Saint: A tender story of a man who has suffered a terrible loss set in Rome, the Eternal City with the immortal beauty, over a sad summer. A story of Art, hope and...self-canonization.

Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane: A beautiful, heartfelt story of unrequited love at first sight, at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. Márquez transforms a simple, uneventful meeting into pure Art.

I Sell My Dreams: An extraordinary story of a woman who had the ability of prophesying through dreams, set in Havana, Vienna and Barcelona. And we get to meet Pablo Neruda.

‘’Love is eternal for as long as it lasts.’’

I Only Came to Use the Phone: A young woman finds herself in an asylum and her real-life nightmare begins somewhere in the Spanish desert. A harrowing story.

‘’They say this is the country of the Moors’’, said another, distant voice that resounded throughout the dormitory. And it must be true, because in the summer, when there’s a moon, you can hear the dogs barking at the sea.’’

The Ghosts of August: A haunted castle in Tuscany is the summer destination of a beautiful family. And this is how you scare the bloody daylights out of a reader in just three pages…

‘’At Christmas, coloured lights were strung between the acacias, and music and happy voices were heard from the balconies, and a crowd of tourists invaded the sidewalk cafés, but in the midst of all the festivities one could feel the same repressed tension that preceded the days when the anarchists had taken over the streets.’’

Maria dos Prazeres: A former prostitute is obsessed with what she perceives to be her impending death. A beautiful, sad story in majestic Barcelona.

Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen: A woman travels to Naples to see the Pope and witnesses a strange, macabre incident. A fascinating mixture of comedy, mystery and drama.

Tramontana: A story that vaguely reminded me of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Brilliant…

Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness: Two children have to spend their vacations under the control of an extremely strict nanny who has a few dark secrets of her own. Set in Sicily.

Light Is Like Water: Two boys from Cartagena who adore the sea feel trapped in their small apartment in Madrid. The solution they come up with in order to learn how to row has tragic results…

‘’She made her mental calculations, and only then realized that they had passed Bordeaux, as well as Angoulême and Poitiers, and were driving along the flooded dike of the Loire. Moonlight filtered through the mist, and the silhouettes of castles through the pines seemed to come from fairy tales.’’

The Trail of Your Blood In the Snow: A young married couple drives from the Pyrenees to Paris. The woman has an almost invisible scratch on her ring finger, but she is bleeding, leaving tears of blood in the snow...This is one of the most beautiful, foreboding stories I’ve ever read. It shocks you and leaves you empty and in pain. Actual, physical pain…

Gabriel Garcia Márquez writes about exile, despair, loss, shattered hopes, broken families. And death. His pilgrims are people of all walks of life, their backgrounds varying, their aspirations remaining the same. In morbid twists and shocking closures, the reader completes a difficult pilgrimage in the land of the human soul that searches for the unattainable and the pure…

‘’It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.’’
Gabriel Garcia Márquez

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com show less

This is a collection of short stories about Latino Americans traveling or living in Europe. Marquez lures the reader into the sense that any one of his stories may not really be going anywhere, but then it suddenly shifts into an impactful climax, which validates all that came before it. Another great quality in the stories is Marquez’s ability to touch upon the human condition in very subtle ways while using magical realism to do so. Also, his descriptions of landscapes and of certain people (particularly women) are succulent.

With the recent passing of Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) I decided it would be good to pay my respects by finally reading one of his books. Being in between story collections, Strange Pilgrims felt like the obvious choice and I knew it for such when García Márquez greeted me in the introduction by recounting a dream where he attended his own funeral: "walking with a group of friends dressed in solemn mourning but in a festive mood. We all seemed happy to be together. And I more than anyone else, because of the wonderful opportunity that death afforded me to be with my friends from Latin America, my oldest and dearest friends, the ones I had not seen for so long. At the end of the service, when they began to disperse, I show more attempted to leave too, but one of them made me see with decisive finality that as far as I was concerned, the party was over. “You’re the only one who can’t go,” he said."

Strange Pilgrims is a themed set of stories that García Márquez published in 1992 but had been struggling with since the 70s, a mutable and often hopeless project he could never bring himself to abandon. Upon publication, it was swiftly and brilliantly translated by Edith Grossman (1993). My Penguin edition has a lovely wraparound cover by Cathleen Toelke, which was another factor in my choosing this book over any of his classic novels.

The stories are centered around Latin Americans in Europe – old and dying, young and struggling, all displaced in a landscape both surreal and devastating. The stories cover realism, magical realism and nightmare. There is in fact a strong element of the macabre at work here and almost all of them deal in some way with (often violent) death. Yet here is the truly astonishing thing: even with its themes and motifs so strongly on display, there is no repetition to be found. This is doubtless due to the long gestation period: "Because I worked on all the stories at the same time and felt free to jump back and forth from one to another, I gained a panoramic view that … helped me track down careless redundancies and fatal contradictions."

There is a great deal of strength and weight to each of the tales. I had come across his stories in compilations before but they’d one and all left me cold. Not so with Strange Pilgrims. It takes nostalgia, menace, beauty, Europe’s antiquity and incompetence – often using an author stand-in who has seemingly “collected” the stories as journalism – and never failed to draw a reaction from me. The majority of the collection only lightly touches on magical realism. A dog is trained to weep over a grave, a woman makes a living selling her dreams, but García Márquez tackles the inexplicable in all forms. ‘The Ghosts of August’ is a straightforward ghost story (and perhaps the least affective of the set due to its brevity) while others lean toward Kafkaesque situations.

‘Light is Like Water’ and ‘The Saint’ are the most conventionally magical realist, design-wise. In the former, two boys demand a boat (much to the bemusement of their parents, since they’re living in a fifth-floor Madrid apartment), having made the whimsical but ultimately dangerous discovery that “light is like water … You turn the tap and out it comes.” And in ‘The Saint’ a man struggles for years to gain a reception from the Pope. His dead daughter’s body will not decay and he longs to see her canonized. Oddly enough, no one seems interested…

‘Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen’ revisits Rome, this time with a bereaved and pious widow on a pilgrimage to see the Pope while struggling to endure so crowded and venal a city. "At that early hour her only fellow diners were the waiters and waitresses and a very poor priest eating bread and onions at a back table. When she went in she felt everyone’s eyes on her brown habit, but this did not affect her, for she knew that ridicule was part of her penance. The waitress, on the other hand, roused a spark of pity in her, because she was blonde and beautiful and spoke as if she were singing, and Señora Prudencia Linero thought that things must be very bad in Italy after the war if a girl like her had to wait on tables in a restaurant."

Death is never predictable in these stories. Señora Linero encounters it everywhere while the protagonist of ‘Maria dos Prazeres’ – "a merciless old lady who at first glance seemed a madwoman escaped from the Americas" – makes careful preparation for her own end, only to have it poignantly upset by the one thing she could never have foreseen. And ‘Bon Voyage, Mr. President’ features a placid and charming dictator, exiled and ailing in Geneva, expected to die any day. But he possesses the will to endure and "the eloquence of an old master" and he’s by no means as finished as he looks…

Tallied up, only one of the twelve breaks the pattern. ‘Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane’ centers on an unbearably pretentious old man gazing in adoration at his airplane partner. Unluckily for him, the most beautiful woman he’s seen in his life takes sleeping pills the moment she boards and remains a mystery. He quotes sonnets and reflects on Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties while longing for her to wake – even welcoming turbulence, such is his vain desire. Kawabata’s concept apparently so fascinated García Márquez that he expanded on it with his final work, the novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004).

Everything works as a distinct entity. There’s no filler – every story is imaginative and unpredictable. However, my favorites are easily the most sinister. Along with Carlos Fuentes and Felisberto Hernández, García Márquez is further proof that Latin America contains a rich seam of horror fiction that for some reason is not often remarked upon. “I Only Came to Use the Phone” is simply one of the scariest stories I’ve ever read. A woman’s car breaks down in the desert and she hitches a ride on a bus. But the bus’ destination is a women’s insane asylum where she’s mistaken for a patient. Asylum clichés are loaded on with a trowel but there is a terrifying plausibility as circumstances collude to keep her imprisoned.

A moray eel nailed to a door frame kicks off ‘Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness.’ Two young brothers are put under the care of an iron-fisted German governess, bringing an end to their paradisiacal Sicilian vacation and as her behaviour grows more and more appalling so does the resentment of the boys. "We soon realized that Miss Forbes was not as strict with herself as she was with us, and this was the first chink in her authority…"

‘Tramontana’ deals with a more inhuman menace, "a harsh, tenacious land wind that carries in it the seeds of madness…" Susceptibility increases with exposure so that the old pros have the most to fear. However, it is ‘The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow’ that best captures the pure disorientation of these pilgrims to the Old World. On their honeymoon in France, Billy Sánchez’s wife pricks her finger on a rose and begins, inexorably, to bleed to death. He rushes her to a Parisian hospital but then finds himself lost, unable to speak the language or regain admittance, doomed and isolated by bureaucracy and his own characters flaws.

Strange Pilgrims is a powerful concoction. Colourful imagery both enhances the terror and regret of displacement and conveys the beauty and mystery that lead a person to endure such homesickness. García Márquez appears not only to have been satisfied with Strange Pilgrims but to have made it the conclusion of his work with the form – in the twelve years to Memories of My Melancholy Whores he published journalism, a memoir and the novel Of Love and Other Demons but no more story collections, making this his crowning achievement in the field. It is exceptional. Simply put, it belongs in your Latin American literary collection. If you don’t have a copy, I demand that you get one.

http://pseudointellectualreviews.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/strange-pilgrims-gabri... show less

Reescribí todos los cuentos otra vez desde el principio en ocho meses febriles en los que no necesité preguntarme dónde terminaba la vida y dónde empezaba la imaginación, porque me ayudaba la sospecha de que quizás no fuera cierto nada de lo vivido veinte años antes en Europa. La escritura se me hizo entonces tan fluida que a ratos me sentía escribiendo por el puro placer de narrar, que es quizás el estado humano que más se parece a la levitación. Además, trabajando todos los cuentos a la vez y saltando de uno a otro con plena libertad, conseguí una visión panorámica que me salvó del cansancio de los comienzos sucesivos, y me ayudó a cazar redundancias ociosas y contradicciones mortales. Creo haber logrado así el libro show more de cuentos más próximo al que siempre quise escribir show less

An anthology of twelve short stories, by one of my favorite writers, Marquez. I'm trying to read some more magical realism into my life, and I picked up this collection as a starter. The stories were actually much more pure realism than his previous collections, which doesn't detract from his masterly writing or the beauty of these stories; and though the stories didn't merge the real and the supernatural as much as I have come to expect from Marquez's work, he has the same surreal touch of presenting a dream-like quality to everyday life. The style of his writing emphasizes the magic of the ordinary.

For instance, one of my favorite stories, "Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness". In this story of a sad summer in the life of two boys, the show more narrative begins in a simple structure that I've seen before, young people suffering under the harsh and restrictive tutelage of an overbearing governess. Yet we start with one of the boy's shout of fear over a fish head tacked to the door (a species that Miss Forbes identifies as a mythological creature) and that gruesome death head haunts the remainder of the story, imbuing ordinary events with an air of mystery. When the boys arrive at their shocking decision, the atmosphere of the story makes it not so surprising, after all. Nothing that happens from beginning to end is an event that we would be surprised to see in the modern day, but it all wears the murky costume of a dream in daylight.

Let me try describing another one of my favorite stories, "Light is Like Water", because it is hard putting in words the special quality in these stories. This tale is the reverse of the former; whereas one presents explicable events in a fantastic way, the other describes inexplicable happenings as if they were quite ordinary. In this much smaller tale, two boys learn how to harness the liquid nature of light and swim around their living room in boats and diving gear. They transform an apartment in the middle of a landlocked city into a water paradise. As he describes these marvelous events, Marquez uses simple and clear diction, and a tone that is natural. He has a paragraph, in fact, describing the scientific principles that make the boys' discovery possible. In all ways he writes as if this impossible event were the simplest thing in the world. This is more like some of his earlier stories that I've read, where the supernatural is so grounded in reality that you can really believe.

I am again confirmed in my high regard for Marquez as a storyteller. His characters are so real I can meet them, his sense of place so detailed and vivid that I never for a minute doubt the veracity of his story. He manages to bring out the supernatural quality of life, to merge the fantastic and the mundane in a harmonious union, even in this collection where the magical realism isn't as pronounced. I haven't even really touched on his themes, either, in particular how death is enfolded in life, or how the glorious can be discovered in the cheap and tawdry. A fine book, and a good starting place for those just discovering Marquez. show less

Don't get me wrong, GGM is one of my favorite authors and I normally like the locales, real and imagined, to which he takes me however taking this collection of stories on vacation was a very bad idea!
Firstly, as I read the first story, it began to sound vaguely familiar to me but I continued on and, sure enough, by it's conclusion, I realized I read it before in another collection of short stories by Marquez. One not to give up on my favorite author, I continued to read the other stories, sadly several more turned out to be rereads as well, though well written, it was not the time nor the place for them. Secondly, the stories are consumed with death, dying, old age and reflections of past loves and regrets. Ugh! Again, not holiday show more material! I left the book in the lobby of the Hotel Gellert in Budapest in the hope another reader will enjoy it more than I. show less

'Strange Pilgrims' is a collection of short stories, each one of which is something approaching a masterpiece. If you want to learn to write, dissecting any of the stories in this collection would tell you so much that you need to know, like how to grab the reader's attention in the first paragraph, and how to build character through telling detail. Sumptuous, magnificent stuff.