Strange Pilgrims
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Alfred A. Knopf Publishers)
by J. Austin Rutledge
If you like your fiction on the majestic side, flavored by ebullient imagery but underlain by a keen flair of realism, then you’ll be excited to learn about Strange Pilgrims.
It’s a new collection of twelve short stories by Nobel-Prize winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the eminent writer of classics, Love in the Time of Chloera and One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Strange Pilgrims is the first work to be published from one of the world’s most important writers, Marquez, in three years. And it is significant because what this man has done to influence the style of writing for the past few decades is so great that it cannot be measured. Studied in Literature classes around the world, Marquez’ fiction possesses more originality and imagination then usually found in five novels put together.
The South American Gabriel Garcia Marquez has described his approach to writing the short story as such; “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… Good writers are appreciated more for what they tear up then what they publish.” Basically what Marquez has done with these stories is just that. He has “torn up” everything that takes away from the story-telling process itself.
Marquez delivers these tales in a stripped-down minimalist fashion, unlike much of his previous sensual and fully-descriptive fiction. Strange Pilgrims offers us the bare bones, and that is all. They are simple tales meant to be recited around a fireplace late at night. Tales that ache to be “heard” and not merely “read.”
In “The Saint” we are intrigued by the exploits of a man who has come to Rome all the way from the Columbian Andes with a box the shape and size of a cello case in order to show the Pope its fascinating contents. In “I Only Came To Use the Phone” we become gripped by the plight of a pretty Mexican music hall performer who is returning to Barcelona when her car breaks down and she ends up in an insane asylum. And it is with “The Trail of Your Blood Snow” that Marquez has given us perhaps the most haunting and memorable story of the collection. Uncompromising in its cold and merciless tone of abrading realism, it stands out as a nightmare for our time.
If there is anything that makes it hard for me to fully recommend Strange Pilgrims, it is it’s short duration (188 pages), and it’s escalated price (21 dollars).
That translates out to eleven cents a page – ouch! With luck, you can find it at a library or in a used book shop. Happy reading!
