Strange Pilgrims (Penguin International Writers S.)

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Strange Pilgrims is a collection of unforgettable stories about distinctive South American individuals in Europe from the Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera.

'The first thing Señora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha'

The twelve stories here tell of Latin Americans adrift in Europe: a bereaved father in Rome for an audience with the Pope carries a box shaped like a cello case; an aging streetwalker waits for death in Barcelona with a dog trained to weep at her grave; a panic-stricken husband takes his wife to a Parisian hospital to treat a cut and never sees her again. Combining terror and nostalgia, surreal comedy and the poetry of the commonplace, Strange Pilgrims is a triumph of storytelling by our most brilliant writer.

'Celebratory and full of strange relish at life's oddness, the stories draw their strength from Márquez's generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent' William Boyd

'The most important writer of fiction in any language' Bill Clinton

'Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself' New Statesman

• ISBN10: 0241968658
• ISBN13: 9780241968659
• Publish Date: 6 March 2014 (first published 16 September 1993)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Penguin Books Ltd
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 208
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

Like Márquez always, the definitive definition of “splendid.”

He made a note of something in the prologue, though, that caught my interest: on the decades he worked on these stories, on how they unexpectedly drove him with just as much frustration as work on a novel:

“The effort involved in writing a short story is as intense as beginning a novel, where everything must be defined in the first paragraph: structure, tone, style, rhythm, length, and sometimes even the personality of a character. All the rest is the pleasure of writing, the most intimate, solitary pleasure one can imagine (…) But a story has no beginning, no end: Either it works or it doesn’t.”

Which is exactly what I like to hear, both in line and in contrast with Cormac McCarthy when he said, “I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.”

As when I first read that, I agree in part: up to the fact that— as Márquez is saying here— short stories have just as much right, and power, to willfully wrestle away decades of your life.