“I saw him only once in Boccacio, the popular Barcelona club, a few hours before his miserable death.” It takes courage and confidence to open a story thus, and García Márquez clearly had an abundance of both, 20 years ago as now.

This volume of short stories [Strange Pilgrims] written mainly during his stays and travels in Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, provides the eternal outsider's view of the local, often displaced, residents. It has all the necessary García Márquez ingredients of violent death and magical imagination; physical and psychic suffering and conquest; characters of unaccountable spontaneity and inescapable habits, taken across any age and nationality with the same easy felicity.

For García Márquez is, finally, a happy writer. He has refined his style so it no longer needs to sprawl across the vast canvas of One Hundred Years of Solitude, and condensed its contents so the reader feels s/he knows people and places intimately from the tiniest vignettes. Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself. From the simple philosophy that all life is a journey, we are drawn into the encounters García Márquez has made along the way, with no separations between dispassionate observation and virtuoso imagination.

The terms are set by the introduction: a story of the book's genesis no more or less fabulous than the dozen succeeding peregrinations. For this, as his speech on receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 elucidated, is García Márquez's starting point. Truth is stranger than fiction, history than myth, reality than fantasy. Having mysteriously lost the notebook containing several dozens of outlined short stories, he returned to reacquaint himself with Barcelona and Madrid, Paris and Bordeaux, Rome and Geneva in preparation for this recapitulation of his literary past. “Not one [place] had any connection to my memories. Through an astonishing inversion, all of them, like present-day Europe, had become strange: true memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality. This meant I could not detect the dividing line between disillusion and nostalgia.”

It takes courage to resituate a kind of Canterbury Tales outside the fashionable alternatives in eastern and central Europe. Courage, also, to revert to death as the only common destination, and to the tension between making sense and life's absurdities in our daily pilgrimage.

And it's always writing dangerously to attack the (un)holy trinity of love, life and death by expressing tenderness without sentiment, passion without drama, humour without hilarity or satire. There's not a trace of the sexy saleability said to guarantee bestseller status. García Márquez is master of the unfashionable virtues, retaining a delicacy and intimacy with his characters.

It's as invidious to pick favourites from among the Strange Pilgrims as from any anthology of fairy stories. Here are all the familiar ingredients: clairvoyant dreams and ill winds; a princess's finger pricked by a rose and a body that won't decompose; a sleeping beauty and an incarcerated “madwoman”. Overall, García Márquez writes better on women than men, strangers than natives, cities than countrysides. But this is to pick on marginal details.

Suffice to say that the sequence is also important, starting with the last voyage of an exiled president to his native Antilles; travelling by way of children creating their own “secret garden” indoors and the twilight years of a “lady of the night”; taking in the pink kneecaps of 17 inexplicably poisoned Englishmen; and closing with perhaps the strongest story in the collection. This is a triumph of true naivity over urbane sophistication, and love over reason, with never a hint of cynicism in the supremely simple telling.