Marquez: In the maze of magical stories

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who mesmerizingly fuses the mundane with  the fantastic, is a magical figure in world literature. Colombian born, he is at once a novelist, short-story writer, screen writer and journalist. It is very tough to draw a bottom line about his style as he does not stick to any specific and predetermined style template. In an interview with Marlise Simons, Garcia Marquez  noted :
"In every book I try to make a different path, one does not choose the style. You can investigate and try to discover what the best style would be for a theme. But the style is determined by the subject, by the mood of the times. If you try to use something that is not suitable, it just won't work. Then the critics build theories around that they see things I hadn't seen I only respond to our way of life, the life of the Caribbean".
Though Garcia Marquez is varied in his writing, his works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread success, most notably for popularizing a literary style coined as magic realism. Marquez is widely known for his international best seller "Love in the Time of Cholera" and the Nobel Prize winning "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Apart from his novels, his short stories are also very interesting. "Strange Pilgrims" is a collection of twelve loosely–connected short stories. It was originally published in Spanish as Doce Cuentos Peregrinos in 1992, Garcia's fourth short fiction collection. In the prologue, Garcia states that the twelve stories were written over eighteen years. He explains the cause behind the title and the number of the stories. He recalls how he has gone through one of his dreams and comes to the conclusion that "dying means never being with friends again," and considers it as a conscientious examination of his own identity. With that realization, Garcia Marquez started writing about the strange things that happen to Latin Americans in Europe.
"Bon Voyage, Mr. President" seems to be inspired by true events because the second half of the twentieth century saw many oppressive leaders come and go throughout the Americas.  In the course of the story, this seeming truth is mingled with fantasy. It is the tale of a 73 year-old exiled, ailing Caribbean ex-President in which the author illustrates the opposition between age and death. The story begins with his contemplation on death but ends with a beckoning to his rejoining the mainstream of politics as the leader of a reform movement. Death is a very natural event, but the supernatural is fused with the death of Margarito Duarte's daughter's corpse as it has not decomposed after years. "I Sell My Dreams" is another interesting story of a woman who wears a snake ring with emerald eyes and is known as Frau Frieda who makes her living by selling dreams to wealthy families. That sounds strange. But   Marquez with his magical spell created an aura of perplexity by hovering between the two worlds of dream and reality. "I Sell My Dreams" can be considered as mostly an excuse for a portrait of  Pablo Neruda.
"I Only Came to Use the Phone" is the most horrific and nightmarish one in this collection. A pretty Mexican music hall performer is shown to encounter such a gruesome experience in an insane asylum that will bind the reader into the labyrinth of Magic Realism to be convinced into an unconvincing event. Ghosts are another recurring theme in Garcia's writings. "The Ghost of August" renews the fear of ghosts in every mind when a family encounters a surreal phantom in a Renaissance castle.
Maria dos Prazeres was once Barcelona's most sought-after lady of the night. Dreaming of a false premonition of death, she begins to plan her own funeral and trains her pet dog to weep after her death as there is nobody to cry over her departure. Another bizarre story is "Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen" in which a widow, dressed as Saint Francis, sails to Rome from Argentina to meet the Pope. This story is very touching because of the agony of a lonely aged woman in a foreign land. Her helplessness and the pain of solitude impregnate a universal overtone into the story.
"Tramontana" pays homage to the madness-making wind of the Costa Brava. A beautiful Caribbean boy is driven mad with the fear of that "seductive visitor" and meets ineluctable death at the end. "Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness" tells the tale of a German governess who horrendously kills herself in silence. The last story of the collection is a kind of classic to me. This story calls to mind the works of Franz Kafka. It is a kind of satire to French inhumanity. Here Garcia Marquez touches upon the strangeness that all travelers feel and only sometimes can surmount.  Billy Sanchez takes his pregnant wife, who has a cut on her ring finger, to a hospital in Paris and never sees her again as she bleeds to death.
"Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane" is a lightweight one. However, in this story, Marquez's treatment of beauty is very laudable. The narrator's infatuation with the beautiful stranger reminds one of a famous dictum –"a thing of beauty  is joy forever". And "Light Is Like Water" is the simple and innocent joy of childhood. These stories provide some relief from lives' incongruities.
These stories all differ in different ways, but they are linked by the themes of displacement and exile, of love, death and the memories of a past life in some way or other. Some of the stories have no beginning or end. Many stop at the lowest point, leaving slight indications that there may be some hope left even in the midst of despair. The narration is like the modern oral tradition of journalistic storytelling because the narrator is an outsider to the action, and only narrates what he has learned from other characters. Another cause of its standing unique is that some of the stories clearly transcend the limitation of time and space.
Traditionally fairy tales belong to the Middle Ages. But in this collection, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces the reader to a world which is not like ours. It is rather a surreal world that is full of fantastic happenings like ghosts, clairvoyants, light that literally floods the room, or a magic wind that brings tragedy to lives.  Thus with this collection of short stories, Marquez created a new set of fairy tales  for the twentieth century and onward into the twenty-first.

Shirin Akter is at the University of Chittagong