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Haunted Abroad
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11683 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1994 |
3,487 Words |
| Author
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Barbara Mujica
Barbara Mujica is a novelist, short story writer, and
essayist. Her latest novel, Frida, was published in 2001. Her
other books include Premio Nobel (an anthology of Hispanic
Nobel Prize winners), Sanchez Across the Street (short
stories), Books of the Americas (reviews and interviews from
Américas magazine) and another novel, Affirmative Actions!
(1998). Mujica is professor of Spanish at Georgetown
University. |
STRANGE PILGRIMS
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993
188 pp., $21.00
A Latin is always a Latin, Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez implies in his new short story collection, Strange Pilgrims. Even if a Latin is transplanted to a seedy Swiss boardinghouse or a lavish Italian palazzo, he carries his unique cultural baggage with him. The protagonists of the twelve stories that compose Strange Pilgrims are all Latin Americans living abroad, but they are prey to the same demons, natural and supernatural, that haunted them at home. Political tyrants and bungling bureaucrats take their places next to apparitions, wraiths, and specters in this bizarre world, where everything is larger than life and there is no real distinction between the real and the magical.
Garcia Marquez grew up with ghosts, so it's not at all strange that his fiction is permeated by them. Born in 1927, he spent his early childhood in the province of Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, in the home of his highly superstitious maternal grandparents. He recalls that they had an enormous house, full of spirits and ghouls that inspired terror. His grandmother walked around like a crazed woman, talked in code to delude the spooks, and declared the family residence dangerous after a certain hour, but she was a brilliant storyteller whose tales of magic and horror would be an important influence on her grandson's writing.
Her husband, a Liberal who had fought in the last of the bloody civil wars that racked Colombia during the nineteenth century, was Garcia Marquez's hero and served as a model for several of his characters. Having killed a man, he abandoned his village and founded another, a situation reflected in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the author's best-known novel. When his grandfather died, the family moved to Sucre, where Garcia Marquez finished high school in 1946. He began his university studies in Bogota at nineteen and shortly thereafter published his first story in the weekend section of a local newspaper. Other stories followed, several of which would be included in the collection Ojos de perro azul (Eyes with blue dog; 1972), but at the time, the young writer had other concerns.
In 1946, the Liberal Party, which had governed for years, was defeated in the elections when rival Liberal candidates split the vote. By the end of the following year, the rural conflicts between
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