These days, short stories are my cup of tea because each one can be devoured in one sitting.

Strange Pilgrims is a collection of twelve stories compiled by GG Márquez from his travels through Europe. Let me approach this through constructivism: Márquez’s style always makes use of magical realism, and symbols are present in every story. The main themes are death and its effects on the living, as well as light and its absence. The common recurring symbol is blood. This reminds me of his heavy use of blood and the bleeding incidents in Chronicles of a Death Foretold.

My top five Strange Pilgrims stories are (this is ridiculous, with GG Marquez it’s impossible to settle for just five!):

“I just came to use your phone”: Maria is driving alone to Barcelona when her car breaks down and she gets on a bus carrying women to a nursing home. In her destiny, Maria is supposed to be one of them.

Maria dos Prazeres- An aging prostitute waits for death to come to her apartment in Barcelona with her dog that she has trained to cry at her grave.

Sleeping Beauty and the Plane – A very beautiful woman sits next to the author on a flight. He is completely captured by her beauty, and here he expresses her reflections.

The Ghosts of August: A family on vacation in Tuscany decides to spend the night at a friend’s castle where, according to legend, the builder killed his girlfriend in bed before setting dogs on himself. The family then discovers the truth of this story the next morning when they wake up.

The people of Tramontana seek refuge from the Catalan wind that the locals call the Tramontana, bringing with it the paranormal effects on everyone.

I have a special taste for these death stories:

tramontana

Miss Forbes’ Summer of Happiness: Two children enjoy the serenity of a quiet summer vacation until a strict German nanny arrives.

Light is like water: two children ask for a boat in exchange for their good grades at school. Due to the absence of navigation water, they break the light bulbs in your home and the light comes out like water.

The trail of your blood on Snow-Billy leads his new wife to a hospital to help her stop the bleeding from a scratch on her ring finger by a rose thorn and he doesn’t know he’ll never see her again.

Márquez arranged the stories himself in the order in which he wrote them. Each one has a pilgrim story to tell, in beautiful cities like Rome and Paris. Naturally, save the best for last.

Even the prologue has to tell the strange story of Marquez, of him visiting his own funeral and finally seeing his closest friends, but once the funeral is over, he just can’t leave.

Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez is a Colombian novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and journalist. García Márquez, familiarly known as “Gabo” in his native country, is considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. In 1982, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Starting out as a journalist, he has written many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and great commercial success, notably for popularizing a literary style labeled magical realism, which uses magical elements and events to explain real experiences. Some of his works are set in a fictional town called Macondo, and most of them express the theme of loneliness.

-Good reads

“True memories seemed like ghosts, while false memories were so compelling that they replaced reality.”

With Márquez, the name of the game is magic and majesty, each pilgrim emerges entranced.

Next on my reading list is Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, unless someone wants to donate another book to read. What’s on your reading list?