New Literature

GABRIAL

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 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...