Fragments of a Fabulous World

By Paul Gray

COLLECTED STORIES by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 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 Marquez, 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 Marquez'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 Marquez 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 (1948), 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 (1950), Garcia Marquez 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 (1951) 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 Marquez 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 (1962) 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.

In Balthazar's Marvelous Afternoon (1962), a simple carpenter builds an awe-inspiring bird cage for the son of the wealthiest man in the village. When the father balks at paying, Balthazar gives it to the boy as a present. When the poor donate to the rich, the social order begins to tremble. The powerful man feels humiliated, and the carpenter gets drunk, confused and boisterous: "We have to make a lot of things to sell to the rich before they die. All of them are sick, and they're going to die. They're so screwed up they can't even get angry any more."

A place called Macondo begins cropping up in the stories, as do the names of some who have figured prominently and mysteriously in its history: Colonel Aureliano Buendia, JoseArcadio Buendia. The village-universe of One Hundred Years of Solitude makes brief, embryonic appearances. Big Mama's Funeral (1962) seems a small dress rehearsal for the extravagant saga that was to follow. The death of Macondo's matriarch sends nearly everyone into frenetic activity. Lawmakers debate: "Interminable hours were filled with words, words, words, which resounded throughout the Republic, made prestigious by the spokesmen of the printed word. Until, endowed with a sense of reality in that assembly of aseptic lawgivers, the historical blahblahblah was interrupted by the reminder that Big Mama's corpse awaited their decision at 104DEG in the shade." By the time affairs are settled and the Pope arrives, it seems possible that he is indeed attending "the greatest funeral in the world."

The post-Solitude stories in this volume exhibit a slight decline in energy and enthusiasm, as if the writer now feels cramped by a form that he had enjoyed experimenting with earlier. Perhaps, as the evidence of the past twelve years suggests, he has gone over entirely to the writing of novels. But Garcia Marquez, at 56, is still vigorous and inventive enough to move wherever his talent dictates. It is good to have the Collected Stories and permissible to hope that they will not be the end of the tales.

--By Paul Gray

Excerpt

" This is, for all the world's unbelievers, the true account of Big Mama, absolute sovereign of the Kingdom of Macondo, who lived for 92 years, and died in the odor of sanctity one Tuesday last September, and whose funeral was attended by the Pope.

. . . and now that it is impossible to walk around in Macondo because of the empty bottles, the cigarette butts, the gnawed bones, the cans and rags and excrement that the crowd which came to the burial left behind; now is the time to lean a stool against the front door and relate from the beginning the details of this national commotion, before the historians have a chance to get at it. "