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Summary: The best collection of short stories I've ever read!
Review: Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the most incredible writers I have ever encountered. He is a profound storyteller. In fact, his work is like a beautiful Magritte painting filled with surreal images. I marvel at the translator. I can't imagine translating "Eyes of a Blue Dog." How on earth was he able to translate such a complicated story? It's incredible! The other stories are amazing as well. My favorites are "Big Mama's Funeral" and "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." Each story has a special dose of magical realism. I look forward to reading other books from this author. I highly recommend this book.
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Summary: SOME TIME WITH THE PONTIFF?
Review: Here gathered together in a fine translation are stories spanning twenty years that demonstrate beyond argument the genius of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. "Magical realism" has become a cliche, but inimitable tales like Big Mama's Funeral show its enduring worth. The achievement is the blending of the spiritual with the spatial and, as one reviewer put it, "the concretization of real magic". No one story stands out. Gabriel Garcia draws one into a universe of enchanted shanties, talismans and immortal hope. As a short story writer, for this reader, his skill approaches O. Henry and Hemingway. What more can one say? Come to the feast! Spare an hour or two with the Supreme Pontiff, the guava queen, the coconut queen, the kidney-bean queen and the 225-mile-long string of-iguana-eggs queen!
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Summary: Excellent Chronological Collection!
Review: Here in one volume you will have 26 stories in excellent English translations which preserve the aesthetic simplicity of the original Spanish...it would be impossible to give a commment on all the great stories here. The reader will have glimpses of Macondo here and there. the stories I enjoyed the most were in the third section of this book. "A Very Old Man with enormous wings", "the Handsomest Drowned Man In the World" and "...Erendira...." All bear Marquez's signature simple style, with the elements of magical realism...it is a collection to enjoy time and time again...
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Summary: Of course, from Marquez I expect to be in awe, and always am
Review: Marquez breifly meet Hemingway. Actually he saw him from across the street. He said Hemingway had a passion and relentless fever to write, unsurpassed by no other writer in history. Marquez considers Hemingway to be worthy of his aspirations. It is clear however, in this collection of his short stories, that Marquez needs little improvement in producing images that express passions and feelings deep enough and rich enough to drink. Marquez sets the scene, with the use of a small amount of words. The language is acurrate, and filled with immediate images for the reader. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short stories exemplify the authors control of his language, and ability to produce such memorable moods and emotions with such little amounts of letters.Translated from Spanish or not, the images are still there. Hemingway has a rival in dynamic simplicity.
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Summary: Stunning!
Review: Marquez is amazing. I've read other writings of his before, including the "One Hundred Years of Solitude," but these stories totally stunned me. Marquez paints a colorful and magical world around you. His stories flow like a river, you go with the flow unable to stop till you get to the end, and at the end he leaves you thirsty for more. Marquez is an artist, and his stories are colorful, screamingly colorful pieces of art...
Rating:
Summary: Stunning!
Review: Marquez is amazing. I've read other writings of his before, including the "One Hundred Years of Solitude," but these stories totally stunned me. Marquez paints a colorful and magical world around you. His stories flow like a river, you go with the flow unable to stop till you get to the end, and at the end he leaves you thirsty for more. Marquez is an artist, and his stories are colorful, screamingly colorful pieces of art...
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Summary: Enchantingly Surreal
Review: Marquez takes you into a magical tour throughout this wonderful short story book that you can read repeatedly and never tire from it. He is a master at his art and always engulfs you with a subject simply by using his unique surreal style of putting things together in writing.
I have read this book several times in both languages Spanish and English, and grasped more of his "magical realism" in Spanish, simply because it was originally written in that language and there is always something lost during translation, although the English version was pretty decent. Marquez's words are vivid and visual, as you read the stories you imagine them on a movie screen.
The Man With Enormous Wings is a great one, a shabby old man with wings falls from the sky during a heavy rainfall in some tiny South American village, and since the people that live there are superstitious they assume he's an angel from the far away heavens. So they decide to put him in a chicken coop and spread the word that there is an angel in town so people from all over the place come around with bizarre ailments such as a man that could not sleep because the noise from the stars kept him awake at night. Another woman could not stop counting and she had run out of numbers to count. Well, it goes on and on and nothing happens. The freak with wings becomes sick and somehow manages to fly away flapping it's wings like a vulture while Elisenda is cutting onions.
Then there is The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, about some children, playing by the sea and seeing some bulky mass approaching them. At first, they think it is an enemy ship, but discover it is a dead body. The kids drag him into the town and all the women in the village start fussing all over him, especially because he was a big man. They clean him up but couldn't find clothes big enough for him to wear since he was a large man, and they decide to name him Esteban which means Stephen in English, I guess because he looked like a gringo. The men in the village start to get a little jealous about the women fuss too much over this dead Esteban. The women make up stories about what his life would have been like, what he might have done for a living, and felt sorrow over this orphan corpse. Eventually after the women grieve tremendously for Esteban, they gather flowers, hold a funeral, and he's thrown back into the sea (this was supposed to be a children's story).
Well, there are twenty four more wonderful stories in this book that you must read including Erendira and her Heartless Grandmother, and Death Constant Beyond Love.
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Summary: can't put it down!!
Review: These stories are all magnificent. They are some of the most beautifully written pieces pf literature I've ever read. Nearly perfect in every respect.
Rating:
Summary: can't put it down!!
Review: These stories are all magnificent. They are some of the most beautifully written pieces pf literature I've ever read. Nearly perfect in every respect.
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Summary: Stories by a Master
Review: This collection of twenty six stories by Nobel Laureate Garcia Marquez was first published as a whole in 1984, although the stories were previously published in three separate volumes. As a consequence, two translators are credited here: Gregory Rabassa for the stories from EYES OF A BLUE DOG and THE INCREDIBLE AND SAD TALE OF INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND HER HEARTLESS GRANDMOTHER, and J. S. Bernstein for the stories from BIG MAMA'S FUNERAL. Both scholars and avid followers will appreciate the chronological ordering of these tales as well as the dating of first publication from 1947 to 1972 to see the progression of a much heralded talent. As befitting the work of a master, every story is wonderfully told, with deft touches that make each memorable. Many, particularly the early stories, deal with death, particularly the separation of consciousness from the physical body, and many explore the messiness of love. Several combine the two. In "Death Constant Before Love," a politician suffering from a terminal disease falls in love with a girl given to him as a political favor. "The Third Resignation" tells the tale of a seven year old boy who falls into a coma and then grows up in a coffin in his mother's house. Three times, he resigns himself to death. "There Are No Thieves In This Town" chronicles the foolishness of a man who steals three billiard balls from a local pool hall and who loses his wife and unborn child for it. Always, Garcia Marquez's exception talent for storytelling carries these tales alone with a romantic and mystical eye for human vulnerability. His style is never rushed, always lingering over the moment, which gives even the shortest stories the feel of a novella. Not all these stories embrace the magic realism for which the author is famous, although the reader will emerge bewitched all the same.
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