Strange Pilgrims | 
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Product Description
In Barcelona, an aging Brazilian prostitute trains her dog to weep at the grave she has chosen for herself. In Vienna, a woman parlays her gift for seeing the future into a fortunetelling position with a wealthy family. In Geneva, an ambulance driver and his wife take in the lonely, apparently dying ex-President of a Caribbean country, only to discover that his political ambition is very much intact.
In these twelve masterly stories about the lives of Latin Americans in Europe, García Márquez conveys the peculiar amalgam of melancholy, tenacity, sorrow, and aspiration that is the émigré experience.
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Customer Reviews:
• Literary Magic From A Literary Master 17 October, 2007
The author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is well known as a master of the novel, something which the current movie adaptation of his LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA confirms very well. The twelve stories that comprise his STRANGE PILGRIMS demonstrate he's also something of a magician when it comes to shorter fiction as well.
On one level, these are tales of fantastic adventures and encounters experienced by Latin Americans both in their native lands and as they make their way around the world. On a wholly different level, the stories address the more universal and sometimes disturbing question of individual human identity and destiny. On whatever level a reader engages them, they provide first-rate provocative entertainment as well as ample evidence of why Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.
Marquez is celebrated worldwide for his skillful use of magical realism but in these stories moves beyond the formula to create some of the best work from one of the best writers in the business. Inhabiting these tales are saints, clairvoyants, ex-presidents, and specters. Rounding out this already compelling cast are mesmerizing portraits of such famous individuals as the poets Pablo Neruda and Aime' Cesaire. This book dazzles and satisfies in ways that few books can.
by Author-Poet Aberjhani
author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File Library of American History)
and founder of Creative Thinkers International
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3UGBM9S9FB60A
• Colombian Magical Realism Hits Europe 28 October, 2004
I wonder if Garcia-Marquez is capable of writing a bad story. Certainly this selection of twelve are like polished gemstones. They might not be shiny or scintillating, but they are so solid, so satisfying. Each of them centers around Latin Americans, mostly Colombians, and their strange experiences in Europe. Back in South America, they move in familiar patterns, they feel at home, but in Europe, unknown and unseen forces affect them, they are prey to the pitfalls of strangeness, they can't see anything coming until it runs them over. While the gigantic geography, turbulent history, and luxuriant and untamed nature of South America fosters magical realism in authors, at least in Garcia-Marquez and some of the other greats, they also produce characters very much larger than life. Europe has always seemed to me a much tamer place, having reduced uncertainty over centuries--- more set in its ways, with fewer surprises, established, sedate. Garcia-Marquez perhaps sees it in a similar way and it unnerves his Latin American protagonists. An ex-dictator lives in a student garret, sells his jewels, and undergoes a useless operation. A woman disappears "by accident" into a mental institution and a playboy dithers in a cheap Paris hotel, not knowing a word of French, while his young wife dies in a hospital. A postal clerk spends years trying to see the Pope to convince him of his daughter's saintly qualities. He lugs the deceased but uncorrupted daughter around in a huge case. An aged ex-prostitute feels death is at her door, but actually it is something else. Nobody really feels at home, nobody can trust their feelings, because everything works differently. Europe isn't exactly an alien place for them, but they are, each time, unwitting victims of the unexpected.
Garcia-Marquez is one of those authors who seem to write about ordinary people whose lives take strange twists. But the worlds they inhabit, the people around them, the very fabric of their existence seem to me utterly fantastic. His talent lies not in presenting ordinary life, but extraordinary life. You accept a little more, a little more until suddenly you find yourself believing in the unbelievable. In the great warrens of Western civilization, but also in the daily grinds of Asia, Africa, or Latin America, life may take interesting paths, or curious twists, but for the most part, it is very predictable. These stories all have only the veneer of predictability; underneath the realism is full of spooky holes. Yet, that is not only due to a magical tone as in novels like "The Autumn of the Patriarch" or "One Hundred Years of Misunderstanding", it is due to the author's constant combination of known daily life with near-fantasy. You can hardly draw the line between them, so closely does he knit. Great stories by a truly great talent. Read them.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A1TIZI060W4BD9
• Magical 08 July, 2006
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a gift to the world. He produces stories that are full of mystery and magic. My favorite in this collection: an old prostitute who trains her dog to walk to the cemetery and cry over her grave. A good introduction to the master, Strange Pilgrims will keep you to the end.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A24AK00TJPGX55
• Reviw Of Strange Pilgrams 09 March, 2007
More examples of great story telling by the master. I don't believe anyone has put down one of his stories without finishing it. It is difficult not to read the whole book at one sitting. Add it to the Garcia Marquez shelf and enjoy it again and again with the others.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A3S3AM3V3VWVZS
• A Wonderful Collection 19 May, 2006
"Strange Pilgrims" is a wonderful, but sometimes overlooked, collection of 12 short stories from the Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The stories that compose the collection vary in length and quality, but even the less successful among them are worthy of the reader's attention. The stand-out stories include "The Saint", "Maria dos Prazeres", "Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness" and "I Only Came to Use the Phone" -- a bizarre and haunting tale of a young woman whose car breaks down in a Spanish desert, on a rainy afternoon. She is unwittingly picked up as a hitchhiker and mistaken for a mental patient who is taken to an asylum. This theme, of the familiar merging with the nightmarish is explored again in "The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow."
In "I Sell My Dreams", the protagonist meets Pablo Neruda ("He moved through the crowd like an invalid elephant, with a child's curiosity in the inner workings of each thing he saw, for the world appeared to him as an immense wind-up toy with which life invented itself") and discusses the labyrinths of Borges, among other things. "Light is Like Water", a charming ode to the power of a child's imagination, is a story brimming with surreal imagery.
These 12 tales perfectly define the genre of 'magical realism'. The collection also seems like a fine place to start for those seeking to familiarize themselves with the work of Garcia Marquez, before tackling epic novels like "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera". These are the kinds of stories that seem to stick in the reader's memory and welcome repeated readings.
- Reviewed by customer ID: A17H8PTK3MWP0E
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