Word: rquez
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There are no new stories in this collection or, for that matter, any that might be called semi-new. The most recent of the pieces dates from 1972. Nonetheless, many of these 26 works by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, will seem shiny and fresh to everyone but dedicated students of South American literature. The bulk of Garcia Márquez's short fiction was written before his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was published in Spanish in 1967 and in English three years later. That outlandish, exuberant chronicle...
...beginning works seem adolescent, that may be because Garcia Márquez was only 19 when the first story, The Third Resignation, was published in 1947. It is a derivative exercise in the macabre and surrealistic, enlivened with a touch of humor. A boy overhears a doctor conferring with his mother: "Madam, your child has a grave illness: he is dead." The ghosts of Edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry sweep through these early tales, the fear of being buried alive confirmed or denied through trick endings...
...ectoplasmic emanations in these first stories badly need a touch of the humdrum, some ballast of reality not perceived as nightmare or dream. In The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock (1950), Garcia Márquez adopts an entirely new voice. Chiefly through dialogue, he turns what has been the daily routine between a prostitute and the owner of the restaurant she frequents into a collision of moral and life-and-death choices. If this stark story suggests the influence of Hemingway, the next one announces the sway of William Faulkner. Nabo: The Black Man Who Made...
From this point on, the stories grow increasingly less imitative and adaptive; a maturing style begins searching for a worthy subject. Increasingly, Garcia Márquez turns to the bizarre frustrations imposed on people, both wealthy and impoverished, who live in isolation from the world at large. There Are No Thieves in This Town (1962) traces the troubles of Damaso, a poor young man with a pregnant wife, who robs the local pool hall and comes away with nothing but three billiard balls. It is bad enough that he cannot sell them; worse, the social life of the town begins...
...exhibit a slight decline in energy and enthusiasm, as if the writer now feels cramped by a form that he had enjoyed experimenting with earlier. Perhaps, as the evidence of the past twelve years suggests, he has gone over entirely to the writing of novels. But Garcia Márquez, at 56, is still vigorous and inventive enough to move wherever his talent dictates. It is good to have the Collected Stories and permissible to hope that they will not be the end of the tales...