متاسفانه تو مملکت ما ناشران محترم هر اسمی که دلشون بخواهد برای کتابهای دیگران انتخاب می کنند. بار ها شده یک کتاب رو من با چند اسم دیدم. قبلا رسم بود اسم اصلی اثر رو پشت جلد مینوشتند. حالا حتی اینکار رو هم نمیکنند. فی الحال این کتاب رو سرچ کردم و چون ندیدم اینجا اضافه میکنم.

This collection comprises three books of stories, the early "Eyes of a Blue Dog", "Big Mama's Funeral", and "The Incredible and Sad Tale of the Innocent Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother". "Eyes of a Blue Dog" is a series of variations on the theme of death; they would be interesting if Gabriel Garcia Marquez had not gone on to be the most praised Latin American writer of his generation, but not overly so. It has some of the imagination and setting of the later work, glimmers of the interest in characters, but none of the broad sweep, the sense of history, family and community from which the later works derive much of their power. "Big Mama's Funeral" contains stories that presage the best-know novel. In these stories, Macondo makes its appearance, populated by exaggerated characters who undergo outsize events--the Pope attends the title funeral and there is a plague of dead birds in "One Day After Saturday". But there is also a sense of dispossession throughout, but especially in the poor couple at the center of "There are no Thieves in this Town" and the clear-eyed examination of strongman politics in "One of These Days." Death is once more central to "Tuesday Siesta" but with greater power, as a family travels to the grave of a lost son. That story presages not so much the baroque details of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" but instead the knowing compassion of "No One Writes to the Colonel" and "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." (One of the things that I regret about this book is that the copy that fell into my hands is in English; I find Colombian Spanish to have a limpid and refreshing clarity, and Garcia Marquez' use of that quality is masterful). In "Innocent Erendira", the stories in which are dated around and after the writing of "100 Years" veer more toward the fantastic vein. In "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" the device of placing the extraordinary among everyday Colombians is powerful, but it is one of the shorter and simpler stories. The longer stories tend to wander to no great effect. And the title story is dreadful: Garcia Marquez, who had so much to say about community and family, completely failed to understand the gravity of a young woman forced into prostitution by her mother. This is not in the vein of other writing, where he showed that he belonged to the with-a-heart-of-gold tradition, but if one is going to write on this theme, it has to be with the great deftness, and not with tools of exaggeration, some of it winsome. There are a few, quick mentions of the torment of the bed, but much more space is given to the men waiting in line. We know more about trafficking and awful families than he did then, and I am not asking for Lifetime-channel didacticism, but writers have the responsibility to understand what they take on (and presumably make money from), and here Garcia Marquez fails completely. Having read a fair amount of his work by now, I have come away more moved by the restrained and precise compassion of "No One Writes" and "Chronicle" (and, for that matter, "Tuesday Siesta") than by the pyrotechnics of "100 Years" and with his trademark blend of the fantastic and the mundane, especially within in the confines of the short story. In the stories of exaggerated reality, I am not sure that we come away at the end knowing much more about the people who populate them than we did at the start.

Daniel Salvidor Trueba de Clausen, the town book reviewer, lived ten steps from the town church in a small house of an ancient lineage with a door that was never locked. It was said that the town priest would set his watch to the reviewer's morning walks which he conducted with an accountant's regularity.

For many years he worked tirelessly at his craft, turning out book reviews with a machine that would tint the paper with the yellowed residue of old books as if his reviews were of some ancient vintage.

Around the time of his Gabriela Garcia Marquez book review, his habits became irregular, almost primitive, and so the town was thrown into a great confusion when the priest could no longer time his watch properly and sermons were held at ludicrous times based on the whims of a fickle timepiece rendered useless by the change in the mood of the town book reviewer.

Town gossip said that a woman was the cause.

The day of the fabled book review an oppressive heat settled on the town. Even the town whores settled on the patios for respite, unwilling to brave a deadly heat. On that day, de Clausen continued to work away at his review machine, typing the various keys that produced the words that would pass unholy judgment on the art of others.

That day, the priest wandered out of the church vaguely. His walk was unusually muddled. News that the illustrious book review would soon be finished passed from ear to ear, but the priest seemed unequal to the moment. Unaware how he should appear at de Clausen's family home, whether to sanctify the review as if the birth of a profit with Holy water and bread, or whether to call the town's mayor to arrange some small festivities for that evening, he arrived with nothing at all but his humble confusion.

Seated on de Clausen's porch he let the heat overtake him. As he unbuttoned his robe he realized that he had never been so hot in his life. One by one he removed his clothing until he was in his underwear. And still the sounds of the machine churning words would not stop. He lay his head down and enjoyed a moment of respite. The oppressive heat eventually broke in the dull purple of dusk.

As he woke, he reached to gather his clothing but realized with a shock that they were gone. In their place was the review with pages gilded in the yellow residue of ancient texts. As the priest looked up, he saw a man in a priestly robe leaving town by the main street on a horse with three of the town's most revered whores.

On the last line of the review was a note to the priest.

"I leave my review machine to you. May it bring you joys beyond imagination, Padre, in this review and the next."

Signed.

Daniel Salvidor Trueba de Clausen

Read the exciting conclusion here:
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القصص الصغيرة..

☆ Reading Marquez's works and literary style; magic realism has been my comfort read, and made the Columbian novelist my all time fave author, his works almost always resonates within me, must be the Filipino in me

Incredible first and foremost as a chronology of Marquez's development as a writer. They start out simple, weird, and obsessed with death (seriously, the first third is nearly all variations on the ghost story). They end up elegant, thematically complex, and obsessed with life. Unlike Borges (the other most-read "magical realist"), it's clear that Marquez did not do his finest work in the short story format, but they mirror his work as a novelist, and that's really cool to see.

An anthology collecting three shorter anthologies of Garcia Marquez's short fiction, which in turn collect works originally published (in Spanish, naturally) from 1947 to 1972.

Overall, I was underwhelmed. I'm not sure how much of this is the result of the stories simply not resonating with me versus how much of it is just my increasing disappointment and dissatisfaction with the post-Chekhov "short story" format in toto- stories that strive for poignancy and ambiguity rather than completeness or closure, stories that emphasize tone and just-out-of-reach feelings and ideas over plot or, often, even characterization, stories that risk imploding due to a navel-gazing fetishization of the act of storytelling itself, over the heftier appeals stories can have. A few authors have been able get away with this stuff, but the past century has seen a lot of poor short fiction, and a lot of anthologies featuring one or two powerful stories and a dozen duds where the author's reach exceeded their grasp.

Anyway. Garcia Marquez is not a bad writer per se. His ideas are often powerful, and the sense of place evident in his writing is always very strong. But at least in this format- brief stories that try to be evocative rather than to entertain- it's mostly in the service of duds. There are highlights- Eyes of a Blue Dog, There Are No Thieves in This Town, One Day After Saturday- where the combination of images and language achieve something interesting. The last and longest story in this collection, The Incredible and Sad Story of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother, is also one of the weakest and least evocative, being a dull, miserable shaggy dog story, which left a bad taste in my mouth.

I am not a fan of short stories but Marques' are an enchanting exception.

Like a lot of reader, I had heard of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's works and how great they were. I was told to get Gregory Rabassa's translation, as it is rated the best. Having read none of his other works, and feeling rather down that day, I decided to start reading this essay compilation.

First essay: it's about death.
Second essay: it's about death.
Third essay: death.
Fourth essay: death
Death.
Death.
Death.
Death.

At this point, it's taking me days to get to the next essay because I'm pacing my reading according to whether I'm in a good mood or not. Then my love accidentally brought back the book to the library before I finished it. Apologies to Marquez from beyond the grave, but I don't know when I'll read it again.

My conclusion: If you want to cry or if you want to go goth or emo, it'll be a great experience.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a fabulist, a sorcerer with language whose surprising and potent imagery and characters impel the reader from one story to another in this collection that spans 1947 to 1972. One of the benefits of this collection is that the reader sees the development and maturation of a most amazing literary talent from his earliest days to his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Garcia Marquez' earliest stories are strange metaphysical creations that seem to occupy a place somewhere between the living and the dead, where time is relative and past, present and future coexist. The influence of Edgar Allan Poe is apparent in stories that concern death, decay and transfiguration. Except that Garcia Marquez, unlike Poe, has access to modern theories of physics and notions of time/space that the melancholy Richmonder lacked. Garcia Marques artfully exploits some of these ideas in his early stories without resorting to science fiction genre writing. Another strong influence on Garcia Marquez as a writer is Franz Kafka, particularly his surrealist "Metamorphosis."

Garcia Marquez' style of writing has been characterized as "magical realism," a fluid way of communicating in which the ordinary and the completely improbable coexist quite comfortably. This approach has been traced to a youth spent in Aracata, Colombia with his maternal grandparents where the writer listened to fantastic tales, folk beliefs and superstitions from his grandparents as well as the local residents. Adding to this taste for the supernatural, the young Garcia Marquez was often taken by his grandfather to circuses where he marveled at the strange creatures and began to develop a sense of the everyday world as strange and unpredictable. Another literary influence in Garcia Marquez' early development as a writer was Faulkner, with his cryptic but engaging story-telling style, malleable sense of time and bizarre characters.

The evolution of his art takes Garcia Marquez past his early experiments where the influence of his literary models, as well as his life models, are evident to his more mature writing in which he finds his true voice to create unusual but fully human characters with many dimensions, as well as story lines that do not require so much a willing suspension of disbelief as a complementary imagination supported by a child-like curiosity. It is this more mature style that shows itself in Garcia Marquez' later short stories as well as in his novels, "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera."

Shortly after beginning his career as a fiction writer Garcia Marquez became a newspaper journalist for El Heraldo in Barranquilla, Colombia. He worked for a series of newspapers in his native country and in Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela and the United States while also writing his novel and stories. He once told a reporter that he always considered his true profession to be that of journalist. That may well be the case, and his short stories may be missives from the dark back country of the mind that most people would rather not visit—a place that offers little certainty but much enchantment.

My dad told me that Marquez is among the greatest writers he has read so I walked in with high expectations. Some stories are good but, overall, this collection doesn't necessarily reflect the work of an all-time great. It appears that many readers and critics agree that these short stories were part of the development of the writer and were before he had perfected his craft.

What comes through in the stories is Marquez's fascination with the supernatural. The supernatural element is somewhat dark in the earlier short stories; less so in the later stories. Death seems to be a theme of much interest to Marquez. He explores the subject in many stories and allows the reader to join his exploration but-- and the following is not a complaint but just an observation--we are none the wiser at the end.

The best stories in the collection were "Innocent Erendira And Her Heartless Grandmother" and "The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock. " The story about the old man with enormous wings was quite enjoyable too. I particularly liked the following sentence about the people who came to see the old man: "A Portugese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake."

Overall, the collection was worth a read but it didn't leave a lasting impression as a classic.

magical realism olympics. i really had to space these out to enjoy them, but i did enjoy them! my favorite was the handsomest drowned man in the world