Dreams, Follies, Miseries Abroad
SONENCLAR, KEN
Dreams, Follies, Miseries Abroad_ Strange Pilgrims By Gabriel Garcia Marquez Translated by Edith Grossman Knopf. 204 pp. $21.00. Reviewed by Ken Sonenclar Freelance writer TRAVELING through...
...Thus in "'I Only Came to Use the Phone'" we encounter a woman mistakenly imprisoned in a mental institution...
...In "The Saint," Margarito Duarte has traveled to Rome from his village in the Colombian Andes with the weightless, incorruptible body of his dead daughter...
...The book has been kicking around in the author's mind for a long, long time...
...He writes long, documented letters to the Papal Office, quietly waits outside the pontiff's summer palace, and always has the Saint with him, in case the opportunity of an audience should arise...
...Certain images will surely remain in memory, but the motifs of exile and alienation cannot substitute for the rich textures—the intricately woven plots and deeply drawn characters—that have made his novels so unforgettable...
...I was reminded of that excursion while reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez' new collection of short stories...
...They are found out when the light "floods" during a party with 37 classmates, bringing a fire brigade to the building...
...The only overtly political story in the collection is "Bon Voyage, Mr...
...Taken together, their effect is something akin to that of a concept music record—Paul Simon's Graceland, for example, or The Police's Synchronicity—where a common thread runs throughout...
...Ultimately, Strange Pilgrims is more interesting for its thematic structure than its literary technique...
...But their underlying concerns—love, fidelity, obsession, faith, power, solitude, trust, death—will be familiar to any Garcia Marquez reader...
...Italy or Spain...
...And one story, "Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane," which simply tracks a verbally constipated man's bizarre fixation on a stunning woman during a transatlantic flight, is so thin it appears to have been included merely to round out the dozen...
...What confounds this otherwise uncomplicated tale is the suggestion that the couple's good deed may be a stepping-stone to the old man's return to power?certainly not their intention...
...In addition, the cultural clash between the Old and New Worlds provides a fresh backdrop for many of the stories...
...We assumed that they came from Madrid, and by most measures—their designer clothes, their attentiveness to the tour guide, the video cameras they shouldered —you couldn't distinguish these people from the rest of the burgeoning European middle class...
...As Garcia Marquez quietly demonstrates, though, the Caribbean reality is not the European reality: When a Papal functionary lifts the Saint and feels her weightlessness, he dismisses it as "a case of collective suggestion...
...Others, however, are striking in their originality, infused with the magical twists we have come to expect from the author...
...The weakest stories disappoint because Garcia Marquez, apparently losing interest in his characters, resorts to tying up the strands with endings that will seem hackneyed to any Twilight Zone watcher...
...On and off for years, the Nobel Prize-winner from Colombia further explains in a brief Prologue, he returned to the project, eventually distilling 64 separate ideas down to the 12 tales here...
...In "Maria dos Prazeres," a 76-year-old Brazilian prostitute with "a laugh sharp as hail" teaches her dog to weep over the grave that a dream tells her she will soon occupy...
...several have gone through initial incarnations as television scripts or straight journalistic accounts...
...This compilation is different in that it was conceived as a the-matically unified work...
...He spent much of his early career as a foreign correspondent in Paris, Rome and Barcelona, and in 1981 he told the Paris Review that for over two decades he had been wanting to chronicle the lives of Latin Americans abroad...
...The Ghosts of August" has a couple who awake in a bed soaked with the blood of a murder committed there centuries before...
...The supernatural Caribbean world is abundant among the Pilgrims...
...Two affluent boys, nine and seven, left alone by their parents Wednesday evenings, go sailing and diving around their Madrid apartment in a sea of light...
...Seemingly cold and calculating, ready to con him out of whatever remains of his fortune, the couple wind up spending their own savings to settle his hospital bill and send him home...
...Perhaps the most entertaining narrative is "Light Is Like Water...
...But just hours into the tour, it was evident that amid the uniform troupe there were six free spirits...
...To Garcia Marquez fans hungering for a new novel it will be no more than a tidbit...
...As the group assembled in the lobby of a Bergen hotel 1 noticed that, except for an Australian couple, our 30 fellow travelers were all speaking Spanish...
...All dogs can do it if you train them," she assures the startled salesman arranging for her cemetery plot in Catalonia...
...Garcia Marquez has published several volumes of short fiction, most notably No One Writes to the Colonel (1968) and Leaf Storm (1972...
...Reviewed by Ken Sonenclar Freelance writer TRAVELING through Scandinavia a couple of summers ago, my wife and I signed on for a three-day tour of Norway's southern fjords...
...It is set in Geneva, where an opportunistic young Caribbean couple aim to take advantage of the sick, exiled ex-President of their country, but fall under his thrall...
...Only two of them have been published in English before...
...After all, just as water flows if you "turn the tap," so does light "with just the touch of a switch...
...The fallen President, moreover, voices the ambivalent feelings many of the expatriates hold toward Latin America...
...Strange Pilgrims explores the dreams, follies and miseries of Latin Americans in Europe?from those "just visiting" to others who, by design or default, wind up as foreigners for decades in Switzerland...
...President...
...Like those classic albums, too, Strange Pilgrims is uneven...
...The native land he loves he also describes as "A continent conceived by the scum of the earth with-out a moment of love: the children of abductions, rapes, violations, infamous dealings, deceptions, the union of enemies with enemies...
...They spoke nearly fluent English and seemed to have a lot more in common with us—being big NFL fans, among other things—than with the Europeans...
...He carries her around in a box about the size of a cello, hoping the Pope will formally canonize her...
...They argued with gusto, laughed from their bellies, and kept a certain distance from the others...
...It turned out that the six were not Spanish but Mexican, at the tail end of a summer-long grand tour...
Vol. 76 • November 1993 • No. 13
