This collection includes three sets of Garcia Marquez's short stories. The stories in this collection are organized in chronological order, and it's fascinating to see how his style evolves and changes over time. The first set of stories are incredibly abstract and focus mostly on the blurry line between life and death. For example, a young boy dies but his mother tends to him in his coffin as his body continues to grow until he dies again in his 20s. As the years pass, the stories begin to include characters that appear also in "100 Years of Solitude". The earlier stories have less dialogue than the later ones, and by the end of the collection, you have entered the terrain of Garcia Marquez: timeless locales usually in the desert with precisely spoken characters who exist between reality and magic. His stories always make me think of Dali's painting of the clocks melting all over the desert.

I delve into Garcia Marquez stories as if I'm swimming into oceanic waters filled with wonders. Suddenly, I sprout gills and I can breathe in all kinds of fantastical sights. My waking dream is that I can write magical realism like Marquez.

This was not what I was expecting, in a very good way!

In the first set of short stories Márquez writes in a very visceral and surreal way -- describing various states of death/after death in unique ways that I rather liked.

His middle section focused more on social commentary, and I often felt like Márquez was either too subtle or I was too dull to find them particularly interesting.

This is the first I've read by Marquez and OK, I guess.

One of Marquez's themes that becomes clear over the course of these twenty-six stories is the way that the odd quickly becomes familiar, and how some things that are familiar are actually rather odd in practice. The first batch of stories, published as "Eyes of a Blue Dog" in Spanish, are insistently concerned with the limits of physical existence. The characters experience blindness, death, and other hardships tied to their bodies. Marquez finds a way to pick out the salient details, creating drama out of even a man shaving himself using his own reflection.

That reflection story in particular manages to hint at his later moves towards the fantastic. The third and final batch of stories starts with the excellent story "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," which chronicles the arrival in town of a very old man with enormous wings. Initially a spectacle, he quickly ceases to hold any value for the town's residents, forced to subsist on mush in a chicken coop. Marquez shows how the ordinary can subtly be fantastic by presenting a fantastic situation that quickly turns ordinary. I suppose this is an aim of the larger magical realism movement too.

The voice is hard to pin down, too. It's got that slippery feel of translated prose to it, but not the simple, plain-spoken quality of Murakami's take on magical realism. It can be sensuous one moment, and clinical the next. It dives into characters and spins out of them just as quickly. It refuses to be pinned down, but still feels as if it was all written by the same author. I could never really get my thumb on it, partially because the stories span such a length of time in the developing talent of Marquez.

Overall, it was a pleasure to read but I can't say that I was blown away like I was by some of the other stuff I've read recently. The stories did have their wonderful moments, but they were diffuse and not quite as discrete-blow-to-the-cranium as the best ones are. The book felt weird, but too comfortable for my taste. Maybe it's because today's authors have already digested and iterated on Marquez's style, but the whole experience felt like I was reading something I'd seen somewhere else. I can understand why my friend Maggie so eagerly pushed it on me, but the effect was more of recognizing why it's good, not feeling why it's good.

6. Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez
translators: Gregory Rabassa & J. S. Bernstein
published: 1984
format: 343 page paperback
acquired: December
read: Jan 18-25
rating: 4½

Original collections:
Eyes of a Blue Dog: stories 1947-1955, English translation 1968. Translated by Gregory Rabassa
Big Mama’s Funeral: stories 1962, English translation 1972. Translated by J. S. Bernstein
The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother: stories 1968-1972, English translation 1978. Translated by Gregory Rabassa

Márquez spent his youngest years away from his parents, living in the Columbia coastal town of Aracataca with his grandparents, who he explains were both great story tellers. His grandmother would mix in fanciful aspects to her stories without breaking her tone, as if she was telling all fact. He has explained these were huge influences on his writing. And it seems he was always writing.

This is my first step into Márquez. I will follow him in mostly a chronological manner, and this collection includes some of his earliest published work. The first story, The Third Resignation, was published in 1947 when Márquez was 20 years old. What this collection offers in an evolution in the writing of talented and creative story teller.

Eyes of a Blue Dog, the first collection, is weakest and yet the one I find I have the most to say about, because of how his writing changes from story to story. Several things are notable about the earliest stories, The Third Resignation, The Other Side of Death, and Eva is inside her cat. They have striking opening lines, with words like "sharp", and phrases like "cold, cutting, vertical noise", they are psychoanalytical, idea heavy, and rather dull to read, leaving this reader interested, but counting pages till the end. The Other Side of Death ends "in the other world, the mistaken and absurd world of rational creatures,” A phrase that is maybe revealing as to where Márquez was headed. These stories all have very different approaches, and strengths. In the title story a man has an intimate conversations with a woman in his dreams, one he can see, but can't touch, and who he completely forgets as soon as he wakes, even as she keeps telling him how to find her. It's an exploration of desire and relationships. It's a good story, but most notable because of different way to approaching what he is exploring. Whereas the most compelling story for me, the first one where I forgot to count the pages, was straight forward. Titled The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock, it's only a conversation, a flirtatious and manipulative one between between a woman and a bar tender in an empty bar. There are five more stories after that, and I would say each one is just a much better story, much more readable, then the earlier ones, but still very imaginative. And, in each story, it seems he's getting closer to home.

Every story in Big Mama’s Funeral is well developed. One might say a maturing author developing into mastering his abilities. The stories are starting to feel like pieces of a larger worlds, like Márquez is just giving us a window and that he could keep going on and I wouldn't have minded. Most of these stories are very much his world in small town coastal Columbia, in Aracataca, which gets mentioned in the last story, the title story. Characters reoccur, the tone changes, and there is a heavy, if dark or darkly tinted, humor. In the title story the tone is hyper-formal. "...and for the third time in twenty centuries there was an hour of confusion, chagrin, and bustle in the limitless empire of Christendom...

The author of The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother is not experimenting so much as making his points through story telling. In the opening story, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, an angel falls into a town and becomes something like a zoo attraction. He doesn't speak and doesn't interact with anyone, just stoically bides his time until his wings heal and he wordlessly flies off. What is Márquez saying? The main sense in all these stories is of a fairy tale, but with all the dark elements, with wonderful characters, usually leaving us with a sense of how small they are in a strange wider world they will never understand. When the outside world comes, it seems everyone always ends up losing something to them, and when they branch out, the characters just disappear. Several of these are really quote terrific, and they all leave something to think about, even if it seems mostly through the authors restraint. He just has a way of writing up strange or fantastic events in the same flat fairy tale tone and it leaves the reader wondering.

So, a fun a collection and a good start for my tour through his work.

Reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez is like coming home, a home crammed with the most wondrous oddities. Birds of wild plumage. Winds that scrape against sanity. Seas that overcome and drown you. But there's not a trace of cold heart-stopping fear. Marquez's realms are Sublime.

Collected Stories is a compilation of three collections: Eyes of A Blue Dog, Big Mama's Funeral, and The Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother. Respectively, each of these collections were originally published in: No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, Leaf Storm and Other Stories, and Innocent Erendira and Other Stories, and I believe the difference between initial published collections and this compilation is that this text doesn't include the title novellas, save for "Innocent Erendira." Spanning work from 1947 to 1972, the first two stories of this compilation, from Eyes of a Blue Dog, are preoccupied with death. Though highly abstract, and, at the same time, visceral, the details twitch and flitter, making the skin crawl. Death elicits unease, yet this macabre obsession shows hints more toward a writer's meager canvas. The characters embody smallness of mind. An ego coddling itself? Much of the first collection is filled with amorphous plots and insulated characters. As the stories progress, and, as we move from one collection to another, we see Marquez step outside of his own neuroses and evolve as artist. His maturation is one of literature's greatest treasures. As the writer strengthens his style, the tales grow sophisticated with multiple characters, interaction, dialogue, and wild tangles of narrative.

Most often, on the first read, Marquez may be difficult to analyze for literal meaning. We simply can't. Our instinct may be to kick back and enjoy the imagery, the sound of the language and the accumulation of tones and hues. What Marquez may lack in characterization and narrative, he certainly makes up for in description and imagery of time and space. From "Monologue of Isabel":

"the notion of time, upset since the day before, disappeared completely then there was no Thursday. What should have been Thursday was a physical, jelly-like substance thing that could have been parted with the hands in order to look into Friday" (100).

"Then it rained. And the sky was a gray, jellyfish-like substance that flapped its wings a hand away from our heads" (94).

From "The Other Side of Death", "Gently wrapped in the warm climate of a covered serenity, he felt the lightness of his artificial and daily death. He sank into a loving geography, into an easy, ideal world, a world like one drawn by a child, with no algebriac equations, with no living farewells, no force of gravity" (17).

From the collection Big Mama's Funeral, Marquez lends from Shakespeare in "There are no Thieves in this Town"; when husband and wife plot against their small home town in South America, they're soon torn asunder from guilt. The burden of masquerading as innocent proves too much for them. "One Day After Saturday" honors Woolf and Joyce. Marquez jumps from characters' thoughts and reveals how each are bound, in a small town, by a mysterious phenomena. We slip through them like wisps of air, feeling and knowing every individual breath and spirit. Marquez, in the spirit of the Modernists, challenges the singularity of existence. He affirms the beauty of fiction, the power of fiction, and the danger of stories in that we can find connection though we may feel estranged from even our closest loved ones.

Death is still prominent but holds more meaning in the last collection The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother. Instead of a single pitiful life hanging in the balance, towards the end of the collection, mortality signifies the ruin of a country, the decay of a culture, and the corruptness of a civilization. "The Sea of Roses" is utterly intoxicating. A story that will hold you. Hunger and death are close siblings, clambering for our attention. "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" an absolute gem, the imagery and characters are embedded into my artistic DNA. A Christ-like tale, but not really, in this story, a stranger washes up on shore, and the town people's hearts grow wider, their faith and compassion, stronger. Instead of focusing on the afflicted man who inspired hope, we turn our gaze to the people themselves and revel in their own strength and beauty, their fatally exquisite flaws, which mean more collectively than the death, or life, for that matter, of a single man. "The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship," another homage to the Modernists of Woolf and Joyce, is complete stream-of-consciousness, no punctuation. Thoughts bleed into each other. Readers, take your time with this one and be sure to come up for air so you can marvel in this tale that will consume you. This work must be kin to another of Marquez's from the collection, Strange Pilgrims, "Light is Like Water" where young boys push the boundaries of imagination and rebel against the pedestrian adult world. "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is another tale burned to memory. All I can say is if you haven't read it, or any of the tales from Innocent Erendira, then you haven't really known how wonderful literature can be.

As I read these tales, I grew hungry to learn their back stories. Where did Marquez get his characters? What snippets of conversations, snatches of songs and tidbits of heresy inspired these wonderful pieces of Art? Which ones were lifted from newspapers? Are the kernels of each from yarns his grandparents spun for him? How many are slips of childhood memories? Marquez's words are imprinted in the genetic makeup of all my writerly endeavors. I look to him as all life seeks bright rays of light.

this is hands down one of the most impressive short story collections I've ever read. it's taken me months to complete, coz I have read it only when I'm at my most Attentive which hasn't been much lately. but wow! what a literary masterpiece this collection was. a masterpiece.

I Sell Dreams by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

It is intriguing to find in a story by the master of Magical Realism real people. Pablo Neruda makes an appearance in this short story, and only that by he dreams something interesting.
He dreams about this outlandish woman who…dreams about his future.
And to return in full Magical Realism, the woman herself dreams about Neruda and his dream.
The irony of this very good story is that the woman who presumably can tell the future dies in the first lines of the story, swept away by a huge wave.
Again, I am reminded by a line in Prizzi’s Honour, where Charlie Partana played by an outstanding Jack Nicholson says:
-tIf Marxie Heller's so fucking smart, how come he's so fucking dead”...
It is an oxymoron to be a fortune teller and then be killed by a wave, on the shore.

On the other hand, Freda, the heroine was Selling Dreams.
She stayed in Vienna, where she was dreaming and telling her dreams to a family that paid for her lodgings, meals and this job of telling them what to avoid and when to go out.
Freda was in control of that family.
Then Pablo Neruda makes an unexpected appearance, as a gluttonous man, presiding over tables and eating lobsters with gusto.
This probably goes to prove that the Realism in Magical Realism is alive and kicking. It is actually part of the attraction, at least for this reader.
I am not keen on magic which is just plain absurd, that’s probably why I do not fall for the Eugene Ionesco plays.
In what concerns Freda’s dreams and her ability, or is it her subconscious’ capacity to tell the future from her dreams and not only that, but insert herself somehow into Neruda’s dream, I believe anything is possible.
After reading psychology and research that shows how Magical human capacities are, I am open to find any outlandish story to be true.
We are taken in a very short story to Columbia, Havana, and Vienna and then sent to Japan through a tea ceremony metaphor. After Neruda makes his Special Guest Star performance, Borges is mentioned and the passage of the dream of the poet which interacts with Freda’s dream:
-tThis right out of Borges
-tIf he did not write that…
-tIt will be in one of his Labyrinths”
It is marvelous how a fabulous writer can include so much in a few pages and reveal his talent in such small pieces. Small, but gems anyhow.
I must express my admiration and gratitude to the giant writer for such moments of bliss, but I must confess that it puzzles me to find the other work I read now a bit too linear, I would not dare and say boring in its description of cows defecating in balconies, hens running amok in presidential palace saloons.
It may be strange phenomena, all my fault – to become disinterested in the most outrageous happenings and situations. It is a proof though that when one starts reading a book in a style which is shocking, one feels the adrenaline rushing and eyes pop out of sockets.
But with time, reading about testicles carried in wheel barrows and scandalous sex does not produce the same chemical reactions in the brain.
Not in mine, alas.
But it will happen again…Insh’Allah.

I really enjoyed Love in the time of cholera but there was too much soul searching, too much avant-garde jazz and not enough lived life in these stories for me. That said, Marquez writes a beautiful sentence, has a poetic sensibility and a sharp powerful intelligence.

I don't know how to review Gabo's writing. His stories seem cursory and childish, yet his themes are all too visceral: poverty, death, exploitation, ... I read a story every day or so without expectation or agenda. I didn't search for meaning or even story; I just experienced each. I'm left with an unforgettable experience and a desire to go to Columbia, rent a 4x4, and see this desert in person.

لا يمكن ان تخسر أبدا وانت تقرا لماركيز
رحلة رائعة في عوالم ماركيز السحرية
نتبع فيها تطور اُسلوب ماركيز وتصاعده
تبدو القصص الاولى متأثرة بالجو الذي خلقه كافكا في السرد الحديث ثم يختط ماركيز لنفسه عالمه الإبداعي في القصص اللاحقة او ما سيسمى بالواقعية السحرية
وفي الجزء الأخير والأحدث من منجز ماركيز ( وخاصة في اثنتا عشر حكاية تائهة ) يبدو التوازن و التزاوج بين البدايات بأسئلتها المفتوحة والسوريالية ومرحلة الذروة بواقعيتها السحرية ..
اقتراحي الوحيد ان يقرا الكتاب من نهايته ليكون اكثر امتاعا وجذبا للقارئ العجول

I've been a Marquez fan for a while and this collection reminded me once again why that is so. Some of the short stories I'd read before as part of the Innocent Erendira collection, but it was great reading them again after over a year and with a different perspective.

The best part about this collection is that it arranges the 26 short stories in chronological form, allowing us to effectively notice the way his work changed and progressed. We start out with a Kafka-esque 'Third Resignation' and 'Other side of Death' and then proceed to the ones that began forming the basis of his later works. While they're all brilliant in their own right, the following are my favourites:

'Tuesday Siesta': I read that it's considered to be one of his best short stories and one of the best ones of Latin American fiction and I believe it. It leaves a lot unsaid and that's the beauty of it. These are the type of stories I enjoy and like to write, so no wonder I resonated with this one so intensely. It is the master at work.

'The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship': It took me a while to realise that this short story is essentially one long run-on sentence told in the stream-of-consciousness format. Recently, I've been wary of this style of writing, as many continue to harper on mundanely in this manner. But this one was lyrical, poetic, brilliant, magical and breathtaking.

'The Woman who came at Six O'Clock': Less magical than the others, the way you get drawn into the woman's story and her deception and her fear, it's fantastic. Before you know it, you're a co-conspirator.

'Innocent Erendira', 'Eyes of a Blue Dog', 'There are no Thieves in this Town', 'Big Mama's Funeral' are some other favourites. 'Night of the Curlews' always makes me shudder.

A must-read for those wanting to get to know Marquez more intimately. The chronological effect really allows you to dive into his mind.