[In the following review, Theroux praises the stories in Strange Pilgrims, calling the work “a rich and wonderful collection.”]

These twelve tales [in Strange Pilgrims] set in contemporary Europe, written over the last eighteen years (and rewritten, Márquez tells us in a prologue, in “eight feverish months”) deal with an often brave but hapless variety of Latin Americans, all either visiting or living abroad—Geneva, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Naples, etc.—who for the most part are unprepared in whatever environment to live safely or well. They are comic eccentrics, mostly, obsessives and oddballs. A woman makes a living by telling her dreams. An old prostitute is waiting for death. A beautiful Caribbean boy is driven mad in Spain. A widow dressed in the habit of Saint Francis sails to Rome from Argentina to meet the pope. A lonely and ill ex-president, dying in Geneva, pawns his stolen loot to get medical attention. (“There is no poverty worse than an impoverished president,” writes Márquez. “Even surviving seems contemptible.”)

There is great sureness in the stories, although several are too brief, and one or two too inconsequential, to matter. There are, however, three classics among them that are worth the price of the book. “Light Is Like Water,” a gem of fantasy, is a story with one of those magic premises found in so many of the tall tales in One Hundred Years of Solitude. (“The boys … broke the glowing bulb in one of the living room lamps. A jet of gold as cool as water began to pour out of the broken bulb, and they let it run to a depth of almost three feet.”) In five pages, Márquez leaves us spellbound with his incantation. In “Miss Forbes's Summer of Happiness,” a stony German governess, a grimmer version of Tennessee Williams's mysterious Mrs. Stone (as in The Roman Spring of), destroys the summer fun of two young boys, brothers, on the island of Pantellaria in Sicily by the Apollonian rules she sees they strictly follow, all the while secretly maintaining the Dionysian ones of her own. And “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow” is a woeful misadventure of folly, bad timing, and vanity in which a honeymooning couple suffer a tragedy (one I feel would be brilliant as a somber Broadway musical), the result of a series of cross-purposes that take place in everyday life, where a heroine, like Rappacini's daughter—it's a very Hawthornian story—dies not so much from the wound she sustains (leading somewhat preposterously to her death) than from the callousness of her young husband, whose obtuseness is as hopeless as he. All in all, I find it a rich and wonderful collection.