Twelve Stories of Solitude

By Paul Gray

Although he won international acclaim as a novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez made his publishing debut with a book of short stories, and he has never abandoned the form. Strange Pilgrims (Knopf; 188 pages; $21), his fourth collection, proves again that the author's distinctive magic realism can come in relatively small containers. But it does so with a difference. These 12 stories take place far from the vivid South American settings of his other tales and novels, including One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1988). In a prologue the 1982 Nobel laureate notes the theme that links these stories together: "the strange things that happen to Latin Americans in Europe."

Hence an aging and overthrown ex-President travels from his exile in Martinique to Geneva for medical advice on a mysterious pain. An ambulance driver at the hospital is a countryman who recognizes the former leader and tries, with his wife, to turn this connection to their advantage. But the old man is broke. His new friends wind up supporting him.

Some of the stories have the loose, easy air of anecdotes. In Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane, a man sees a gorgeous South American woman at the Charles de Gaulle Airport near Paris and then finds himself seated next to her on the eight-hour flight to New York City. She sleeps the whole time.

Others convey all the enchanting density of Garcia Marquez's fiction at its best. In The Saint, a man from the Colombian Andes takes the miraculously preserved body of his daughter, dead at age seven and exhumed 11 years later to make way for a dam, to Rome to seek her canonization by the church. When the story ends, 22 years later, he is still waiting, another outsider absorbed into the rhythms of the Eternal City.