lunes, 8 de marzo de 2010

TWELVE PILGRIM TALES

By: Felipe Argote


One of my hobbies is reading, especially literature.

Pilgrims Tales is a collection of twelve stories of the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For men and women who do not have the patience or the habit of reading, because they are caught in the vortex of the special effects and techniques to catch the attention of television, the short tales is an alternative. Garcia Marquez in this book published in 1992 contains twelve stories that developed in different parts of Europe but at times touch the Caribbean as a starting point or climax of a story. In "Bon Voyage Mr. President" tells the story of the exile of a Caribbean dictator in a European country, then "The Saint" unfolds the story of a naive peasant who has come to the conclusion that her dead daughter is a saint because her body does not corrupts, so he carries her death body in a suitcase to the Vatican where he met a long line of bodies that are not corrupt waiting their turn to be canonized. In "The Sleeping Beauty Plane" the author falls in love with a woman passenger of a plane taking off from Europe, bound for New York. All the way he has bot a chance to make conversation with the beautiful passing, especially when she slept all day until they reach the babel of iron and get lost in the "Amazon of New York." In "I Sell My Dreams" Garcia Marquez tells the story of a clairvoyant who was renting fortune to dream the future to its customers, but could not forestall she was going to die crushed in a car on the boardwalk in Havana when a large wave came from nowhere smashing his car into a hotel. In "Just came to use the Phone" a voluble woman is stranded in the middle of a downpour on a highway during the time of the Spanish dictatorship Francisco Franco, finally achieved the aid of a bus that was leaving a group of patients in a sanatorium mental. Trying to get a phone to request for help she is included in the schizophrenic group. After weeks of being there and make contact with her lover he concludes as everyone else she is certainly not in his right mind.

In "Songs of august" the author makes us remember the literature of Edgar Allan Poe when his family was invited to a medieval castle where people say there are ghosts. In “Maria Dos Prazeres” an old prostitute organized his own funeral train her dog for the visit of her tomb every Sunday. In "Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen" a religious fanatic insists on realizing the dream of his life: to know the pope, but is in the midst of an Italy fresh from the second world war in a hostile environment much different than expected. In "Tramontana", two suicides product of terror to a north wind that attacks Barcelona which affects not only physically but also changes the mood of the people, to the point of making them hostile and fearful to some others. In "The Happy Summer of Miss Forbes" a couple of children are left in the care of a German woman who treats them like members of the SS brigades. They got to the point of eliminating her until they decide to kill her using poison. And they do; only to found in the spectacle of someone using a knife advances them. In "The Light is Like Water" kids ask about a rowboat despite living in an apartment and managed to enjoy using light instead of water to the point that they drown in light. In "Trace Your Blood in the Snow" a newlywed couple decides to celebrate his honeymoon in France. Their happiness is ruined by a small cut on the finger of the bride who got worse in the way to Paris at the point she bleed to death.

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