This level of story letting does not exist any longer! Complex, rich, layered. You need to read and re-read to absorb, to digest and to feel each sentence. Gabo forever!

يحتوي الكتاب على أربع مجموعات قصصية -(عينا كلب أزرق)، (جنازة الأم الكبيرة)، (القصة الحزينة التي لا تصدق لإيرنديرا البريئة وجدتها القاسية) و(اثنتا عشرة قصة قصيرة مهاجرة)- مكتوبة حسب التسلسلل التاريخي..
لم تعجبني المجموعة الأولى..
الثانية كانت أفضل قليلاً..
أخر مجموعتين تستحقان القراءة، وتكشفان عظمة ماركيز كأديب أصيل..

Marquez is pure magic. It's been a long time since I've read him, except for the novella No One Writes to the Colonel two years back, so this was in effect a reintroduction to his work. And the enchantment has not faded.

Marquez resembles three of my favourite authors - William Faulkner, Franz Kafka and Ernest Hemingway. His decadent town of Macondo, where most of the stories happen in a connected universe, owes much to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. And his prose, moving on in sentence after impressionistic sentence without a pause for breath so that you get lost in its cadence without caring for its meaning, is pure Faulkner. The heartbeat of his fictitious universe soon starts melding into that of the reader and he/ she sees, hears, smells, touches and tastes through the author's creations.

But unlike Faulkner, Marquez moves effortlessly into fantasy without advertising the fact: like Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis, his characters can find themselves in any weird situation (in fact, Marquez has openly admitted Kafka's influence). They die, live, move across time and space, get transformed into ghosts and spirits and involved in myriad other weird situations in the space of a few pages.

But in some stories, the author suddenly drops all his flowery phrases and parabolic descriptions and goes for a hard-bitten narrative, where life and death walk the streets of the somnolent Latin American towns. Here, he resembles Hemingway with his spare prose and hard-hitting plotlines.

***

The book is a compendium of three collections: Eyes of a Blue Dog, Big Mama's Funeral and The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother. Of these, the first one contains mostly surrealist pieces which reads more like prose poems than stories (except for 'The Woman Who Came at Six O' Clock', a classic tale in the Hemingway mould, about a woman who may have committed a murder). My favourite from this collection is 'Monologue of Isobel Watching It Rain in Macondo', about a young woman whose sense of existence starts slowly dissolving in incessant rain. (I experienced it recently in Kerala!)

The title story, 'Big Mama's Funeral', is undoubtedly the star of the second collection. By delineating the death of a matriarch and its aftermath, it attains the level of the mythological: in this, it foreshadows The Autumn of the Patriarch, I felt. It also contains many Hemingway-esque tales ('Tuesday Siesta', 'There Are No Thieves in This Town', 'Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon', 'One of These Days') - all filled with a sense of fatalism and quiet brutality.

The third collection contains two of my favourite fables - 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings', about an aged and destitute angel who falls down to earth and becomes a village curiosity; and 'The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World', about a corpse which becomes the icon of a fishing community. 'Innocent Erendira' is a frightening fairy tale about a young, prepubescent girl cruelly exploited by her grandmother, a rehash of the evil stepmother trope - but much more malignant. Every fairy tale motif is inverted here. Almost all the tales in this collection are surreal, and engrossing.

***

An exquisite collection.

P.S: A suggestion - if you are new to Marquez, don't try to "get" the stories. Most of the time, they may not make logical sense. Just get lost in the telling. You will enjoy it. ( If you don't, then maybe Marquez is not for you.)

3.0 out of 5 stars

trust me, no one is more bummed than i am that, evidently, magical realism is just... not for me. while i can absolutely see why márquez is such a celebrated writer, and while i normally love art that explores the themes that were explored in this collection (death, identity, poverty, family), none of the stories in this collection knocked my socks off.

there were a few stories i found to be quite good, and a few that were enjoyable but still left a little something to be desired, but a majority of the stories in the collection just left me feeling like (1) i wasn't smart enough to understand what gabo was going for; (2) there was no point to the story, but i just didn't care for it; or (3) some combination of the above.

what redeemed this collection from a total flop to a mere disappointment that won't deter me from attempting more of márquez's work, was the fact that, even in the stories that didn't hit for me, there were still moments of absolutely incredible writing that left me thinking about a line, a paragraph, or a page, for minutes after reading it.

n  It was an awareness of splitting in two! His double was a corpse! ... That was how exact they were. Two identical brothers, disquietingly repeated.
It was then, as he observed how intimately joined those two natures were, that it occurred to him that something extraordinary, something unexpected was going to happen. He imagined that the separation of the two bodies in space was just appearance, while in reality, the two of them had a single, total nature. Maybe when organic decomposition reaches the dead one, he, the living one, will begin to decay also within his animated world.n

it wasn't a total wash, though. my favorites were:
✨ someone has been disarranging these roses
✨ monologue of isabel watching it rain in macondo
✨ there are no thieves in this town
✨ montiel's widow
✨ the sea of lost time
✨ the last voyage of the ghost ship

and, as i said, i'll still be trying some of márquez's work in the future. i chose to read this collection after feeling like i wasn't smart enough for one hundred years. now, i'm not so sure it was a "not the right time" issue. it might just be me. but i will try it again before i completely forswear the bard of colombia.

"'What I like about you,' she said, 'is the serious way you make up nonsense.'" Innocent Eréndira from, "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother"

Eréndira's quote is for her lover, Ulises, but it is what every reader who has ever fallen in love with Garbriel Garcia Márquez' writing wished he or she had stated about him. For me, this quote sums up my feelings about Márquez. Whenever I pick up his texts, I prepare myself for the most serious nonsense in Literature, and I have not been disappointed.

I came across Márquez' short stories only after reading n  100 Years of Solituden some months ago, and only after reading 100 Years did I notice Márquez' name in my Literature Anthology, n  Literature: A Pocket Anthology (Penguin Academics)n, and promptly added his short story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" to the syllabus of my English 220: 20th Century Literature course. Unfortunately, my students were not as thrilled with Márquez as I, but my passion and interest must have been quite visible; and this is all I ask of myself in the classroom.

Since that first reading, I have re-read that story three times. The second time was out loud to a friend—the very person who ignited my interest in Márquez (she had not read any of Márquez' short stories). And the last time was during my reading of these collected stories (I couldn't resist reading it again). I won't analyze each story—I'll leave that for someone else—but I will say this: you can feel Márquez' arc of writing as you progress through this collection. I was lost in the first 5-6 stories, comprising the first section "Eyes of A Blue Dog". They felt like an assault on my comprehension of what a short story should be; they seemed more like very long poems or digressions. But once Márquez stories became ensconced in the locale of Macondo (the infamous city of 100 Years) with "Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo," then the stories took off.

Nearly half the stories in the second section, "Big Mama's Funeral," touched on a minor character or unexplored theme of 100 Years, and in this section is where you can see Márquez magic realism come to life. I imagined these tales as either addendum's or the tempered beginnings to 100 Years; and although these stories exist well upon their own, they are far richer when you are aware of the history of the town's inhabitants.

Each story in the third section, the title story of the intro quote, is a dream. It is like a moving Picasso painting. It begins with "A Very Old Man," which sets the reader up for intense "serious nonsense". The next story, "The Sea of Lost Time" is absolutely magical. There is no other word for it but Magical. The cast of characters that weave in and out of these tales are simply wonderful, and like the reader, they simply must accept all fantastical things that come there way. These stories must be far less enjoyable for those who do not accept the authority of the author. If he writes that an angel appeared in this normal couple's back yard, then it must be. It is only when the reader accepts these notions that he/she is allowed to function in Márquez' world. Without accepting just one crazy phenomenon, then none of the others are possible; so, one must accept them all with eyes wide open and inhabit a wonderfully magical and folkloric world.

4.5*

there are no thieves in this town

اللعنة على الترجمة التي تسرق روح الكاتب و تحوّل عمل رائع غير مباشر لمجرد نص عادي مصفوف و مشروح جيدًا

صُدمت بشدة منذ القصة الأولى. فليس هذا ماركيز الذي أعرفه جيدًا و قرأت له بترجمة صالح علماني و محمد أبو العطا عن النص الأصلي الأسباني..

يبدو جليا في الترجمة أن علي إبراهيم منوفي - و الذي يترجم عن الإسبانية- قرأ القصص جيدًا ثم نحاها جانبا و قام بكتابة ما فهمه و المغزى و الرسالة من كل قصة. فأضاع ميزة الدهشة التي تُغلف كتابة ماريكز و غيّر في ملامح النص الأصلي و جرد ماركيز من روحه..

منذ القصة الأولى " الإذعان الثالث" و أنا أتململ بين السطور متعجبة من هذه الكتابة السطحية المباشرة جدًا التي لا تشبه ماركيز. حتى إذا ما قرأت " ليلة الكراوانات" التي ذكرها ماركيز في سيرته الذاتية "عشتُ لأروي" و قال متباهيا أنه بعد 50 سنة من كتابتها ما كان ليغير فيها موضع فصلة، أيقنت أن المشكلة تقبع في المترجم الذي فرّغ قصص ماركيز من ماركيزيتها المميزة.. و انتقلت للقصص الأربعة الأخيرة في المجموعة -و التي كنت قد قرأتها سابقا بترجمة محمد أبو العطا في "12 حكاية عجيبة" - لأشاهد الفرق الشاسع بين القراءتين. الأولى بترجمة أبو العطا -و إن لم ترقى لترجمات صالح علماني- إلا أنها احتفظت للقاريء بأسلوب و روح و مراوغة ماركيز و فرادة و تميز لغته و أسلوبه الذي لا يمكن أن تُخطئه. أما ترجمة علي المنوفي فكانت - بالضبط- فهمه للقصة و المغزى منها ثم سطره في ترجمة عربية صحيحة واضحة و مباشرة لدرجة الغثيان. و كأنه يترجم مقالة لا قصة لعظيم السحر الواقعي جابرييل جارسيا ماركيز.


أشفق على كل من قرأ هذه المجموعة . لأنه في الحقيقة لم يقرأ لماركيز و لم يقترب خطوة من عالمه

A wonderful collection of short stories by Marquez. Packed with magical realism, the stories satisfied my desire to relive the feelings I experienced while reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some of the stories were even tied to his magnum opus, with references to Macondo and Colonel Aureliano Buendia, which I found quite surprising.

That being said, there were also numerous stories which were not very interesting or jaw dropping as compared to some of the short stories in the collection of ‘Strange Pilgrims’.

Collected Stories contains twenty six short stories divided into three sections. The stories are in chronological order of their publication. You read Gabriel Marquez from his very early days to his more seasoned tenure as a writer.

Gabriel Marquez writings as a whole clearly improves over time, this collection proves this point. The earlier stories were nothing spectacular and as the collection grows so does Marquez and his writing.

I have enjoyed Gabriel Marquez in both short stories and novel length. He can be a bit redundant but when this man hits his stride at full speed there is no stopping him. This is a wonderful collection to introduce yourself to his writings or even as a refresher, maybe see just how his writing has evolved. Excellent sampler of Gabriel Marquez.

Loved it.

a collection of three of marquez's short stories collections. I feel like this big bindup is really the best way to begin with marquez. it gives the same magical feelings of most of his novels, but at the same time since these are all short stories (with a couple of novellas), it's more compact and packs a punch with the endings.
trying to choose a favorite collection is hard, but truly this book had some of the best literary/magical realism stories i've ever read. no wonder he is the godfather of the genre (to me, at least). also the english translation conveyed that better than the arabic translations i read almost 10 years ago, or maybe my taste in literature has just matured.

1- The Third Resignation:
2- The Other Side of Death:
3- Eva is inside her Cat:
4- Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers:
5- Dialogue with the Mirror:
6- Eyes of a Blue Dog:
7- The Woman who Came at Six O'clock:
8- Nabo:
9- Someone has been disarranging these Roses:
10- The Night of the Curlews:
11- Monologue of Isabel watching it rain in Macondo:
--------
12- Tuesday Siesta:
13- One of These Days:
14- There are no Thieves in this Town:
15- Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon:
16- Montiel's Widow:
17- One Day after Saturday:
18- Artifical Roses:
19- Big Mama's Funeral:
-------
20- A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings:
21- The Sea of Lost Time:
22- The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World:
23- Death Constant Beyond Love:
24- The Last Voyage of the Ghost Ship:
25- Blacaman the Good, Vendor of Miracles:
26- The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and her heartless Grandmother: