Submitted by: Submitted by mdolymia
Views: 10
Words: 1383
Pages: 6
Category: Literature
Date Submitted: 12/25/2015 07:21 AM
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...