Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez is like watching a flock of parrots. They're colorful. They fly. They speak to you. Except that these birds tell you things you'd never expect, and it's only then that you realize they're far from normal. They're extraordinary birds. Their feathers are woven of silk and gold leaf. Their eyes are bright like diamonds.
I first encountered One Hundred Years of Solitude when I was sixteen, and it changed my life. After reading it I could not look at fiction, or life for that matter, with the same expectations, the same traditional preconceptions. The rules for things had been changed. Now, a decade later, I'm reading Strange Pilgrims, and life shifts again. I can't help but compare myself to the narrator in "The Saint," (my favorite of these stories) who returns to Rome after twenty-two years to find his old friend, Margarito Duarte, still ceaselessly lobbying the Pope for the canonization of his deceased daughter. Here, in this collection, Marquez is still tirelessly working at his own self-made calling. In the story, the daughter lies in a wooden box and refuses to decompose. Duarte refuses to give up hope of the church's sanction of her sainthood. In much the same way, Garcia Marquez refuses to stop creating art. Though you can argue he's achieved his success (a Nobel Prize is a good indicator of success in my opinion, although according to Mr. Marquez it's only good for getting him to the front of lines) writing is a continual struggle between one's self and the blank page.
In this effort Mr. Marquez continues to strive and to succeed, where many writers might have relaxed. And too, his art refuses to fade. It remains quietly present and, perhaps, preternaturally aware of us and its space in our lives.
The territory worked in this collection is a land of Mr. Marquez's own imaginings, a place only tangentially akin to our own conception of Europe. The twelve stories in this collection center on men and women, unique in the way only Mr. Marquez can make them, in exile and self-exile and having strange and sometimes magical encounters in lands foreign to them, lands that seem to border on the country of Death.
In the prologue Marquez tells us the history of the works. They are pieces written over an eighteen-year period of time and intended as interrelated parts of a whole, unlike his three previous collections of short stories. Some had been drafted in a notebook, lost, and then subsequently reconstructed. Five of these had been journalistic notes. One was a television serial and one was transcribed by a friend and subsequently rewritten on the basis of that friend's version. Regardless of the spans in time, he places his characters in related situations of alienation and confusion, where the true nature of things is often obscured, and as we watch the reality becomes slowly, sometimes terrifyingly, clear to them.
In the most powerful of these tales (and there are several that are wonderful) we enter deeply into the mind of the exiled and those around them. In "Bon Voyage, Mr. President" we see how a deposed Caribbean president in Geneva, soon to face an operation that may end his life, brings to the life of an ambulance driver and the driver's wife. Believing the president wealthy, they first try and take advantage of the wealth they believe he hides. Later, they adopt and befriend the old man. Finally, he is like their own child; they pay for his hospital care with part of their own savings.
In Maria Dos Prazeres, a prostitute in Catalonia is faced with a premonition of death, and trains her dog to cry over her newly-purchased gravesite. She watches the dog day after day, running to her grave with tears in its eyes, falling deeper and deeper under the spell of her own precognition only to find that life still contains surprises, that all isn't as it appears. And, in "The Saint," we realize that it is Margarito Duarte's efforts that are truly transcendent.
In all of these tales, Life grows and changes beyond a person's ability to perceive, beyond one's fears. But the characters here stubbornly persist in the troubled beauty of their humanity.
The stories are translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman, the second of Mr. Marquez's English translators, and she retains much of the rhythm and virtuosity inherent in the original prose. There is certainly a beauty in the writing here that writers both young and old could strive to emulate, and an undefinable quality that smells Marquezian. While taken individually, the stories are of varying levels of quality. Some I found unsatisfying, some I thought brilliant. ("The Ghosts of August," detailing the paranormal encounter in a castle in Tuscany, is disappointing on its own.) But a cohesive volume asks other things of itself, and if the stories are combined and looked at as a whole as the author intends, they tell us a poignant story of loss and confusion, of life's frailty, of the mysterious and frightening ways life can shift around us when the ground rules are misunderstood or misinterpreted. Life is a flurry of extraordinary parrots, parrots beyond our understanding and control, he seems to say. And we are mere spectators, left covered and changed by the pearls dropped from their mouths.