Strange Pilgrims
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Strange Pilgrims (original Spanish-language title: Doce cuentos peregrinos) is a collection of twelve loosely-related short stories by the Nobel Prize winning Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.
Not published until 1992, the stories that make up this collection were originally written during the seventies and eighties. Each of the stories touches on the theme of dislocation, and the strangeness of life in a foreign land, although quite what "foreign" means is one of Mr Garcia Marquez's central questions in this book. Mr Garcia Marquez himself spent some years as a virtual exile from his native Colombia.
The twelve stories are:
- Bon Voyage, Mr President (Buen Viaje, Señor Presidente)
- The Saint (La Santa)
- Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane (El Avión de la Bella Durmiente)
- I Sell My Dreams (Me Alquilo para Soñar)
- "I Only Came to Use the Phone" (Solo Vine a Hablar por Teléfono)
- The Ghosts of August (Espantos de Agosto)
- María dos Prazeres
- Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen (Diecisiete Ingleses Envenenados)
- Tramontana
- Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness (El Verano Feliz de la Señora Forbes)
- Light is Like Water (La Luz es como el Agua)
- The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow (El Rastro de tu Sangre en la Nieve)
[edit] Story Summaries
The Saint (La Santa) is a story centered around a character named Margarito Duarte and takes place in Rome. Margarito is originally from the small Andean village of Tolima, Colombia but travels to Rome in order to begin the process of having his deceased daughter recognized as a saint. Margarito lost his wife shortly after the birth of their only daughter and she died soon after at the age of seven from an essential fever. Eleven years after her death the villagers are forced to move their loved ones from the cemetary to another location as the space is needed for a new dam. When his daughter is unearthed she is found to be still intact and completely weightless. The villagers decide that she is a saint and pool funds to send Margarito with his daughter's body to Rome. There he meets the narrator at the pensione where they are both staying. Nothing seems to come from his inexhaustable attempts to canonize his daughter and he eventually loses contact with the narrator and other characters of the story. However, twenty-two years later, and after the death of four popes, Margarito and the narrator meet again by chance and the narrator finds that Margarito is still waiting for his daughter's recognition as a saint. It is then that the narrator realizes that the true saint of the story is really Margarito. The narrator states, "Without realizing it, by means of his daughter's incorruptible body and while he was still alive, he had spent twenty-two years fighting for the legitimate cause of his own canonization."
| The Work of Gabriel García Márquez | |
|---|---|
| Novels The Evil Hour, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Love in the Time of Cholera, The General in His Labyrinth, Of Love and Other Demons | |
| Short Stories: Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel, Big Mama's Funeral, The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother, Strange Pilgrims, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, For The Sake of A Country Within Reach Of The Children, Memories of My Melancholy Whores | |
| Non-Fiction The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Clandestine in Chile:The Adventures of Miguel Littin, News of a Kidnapping, Living to Tell the Tale | |
