COLLECTED STORIES by Gabriel Garcia Mrquez Translated by Gregory
Rabassa and S.J. Bernstein Harper & Row; 311 pages; $16.95 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 Mrquez,
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 Mrquez'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
of a tragicomically doomed family won its author the worldwide
acclaim he continues to receive. Collected Stories offers an earlier
portrait of the artist as apprentice, struggling to put together the
fragments of a fabulous world. If his beginning works seem adolescent, that may be because Garcia
Mrquez 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. In Eva Is Inside Her Cat , a beautiful, hypersensitive woman
senses herself dissolving into death and searches the house for some
creature that can contain her spirit: “No. It was impossible to
incarnate herself in the cat. She was afraid of one day feeling in her
palate, in her throat, in all her quadruped organism, the irrevocable
desire to eat a mouse.” What finally happens and how long it takes to
occur are saved for a not very surprising conclusion. The 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 , Garcia Mrquez
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 the Angels Wait contains a wealthy estate, a black
stableboy who has been kicked in the head by a horse, a drooling idiot
child and a rhetorical, parenthesis-choked concluding sentence 375
words long. From this point on, the stories grow increasingly less imitative and
adaptive; a maturing style begins searching for a worthy subject.
Increasingly, Garcia Mrquez 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 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 to atrophy, since it may take months for new balls to
arrive.
