[In the following review, Sturrock offers a negative assessment of Strange Pilgrims, arguing that the collection is comprised of “facile stories, too easy on the mind, soft-centred and poorly focused.”]

Strangeness is something that, in his last novel, The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez did unexpectedly well without. That was by his phantasmagorial lights a plain book, in which he movingly spelt out the last few, stricken weeks of life of Simón Bolívar, the deposed Liberator, as he made his way downriver to a melancholy death on the Caribbean coast. García Márquez had his factual sources to contend with in writing that story, and such embroidery as he allowed himself in impersonating his hero was of a far more responsible kind than anything we were used to from him. The wonderful folklore of his earlier novels had been shelved.

Strange Pilgrims may make it look as though he has now recanted, because in these twelve stories García Márquez is back to fantasizing. In fact, though, they predate The General in His Labyrinth, having been with him as ideas for a decade or more but been written up and published only in the past two years, in intervals of his more glamorous literary work, writing movie and television scripts. The time he has spent crowd-pleasing has done García Márquez no good as a serious writer: these are for the most part facile stories, too easy on the mind, soft-centred and poorly focused.

All twelve are set in Europe, the Europe he himself knows, of smart cities: Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Geneva. And the theme common to them all is, he says, “the strange things that happen to Latin Americans in Europe”. That is by way of a joke, because the sort of strange things that happen to Latin Americans in these pages happen to no one in reality. They are fabulous or allegorical, not strange, as if lifted and carried by thermal current out of García Márquez's hothouse fancy and into a setting too touristy to make a good home for them. I can but cite the last story here, “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow”, in which a brilliant young couple of wealthy Colombians arrive in Madrid on their honeymoon and then drive nonstop to Paris in a Bentley convertible, the girl bleeding all the while from a finger she has stabbed on a rose thorn. Once in Paris, she goes into hospital and bleeds to death there, her dashing young husband—her “tender beach hoodlum”, as the story would have it—having meanwhile been so cowed by the city (or by something) that he holes up in a cheap hotel and only comes out once she is dead and on her way back as a corpse to Colombia. He doesn't even make it to the funeral. This haemophiliac fairy-tale, in which gilded youth is shown out through a gilded door, fails to deliver any frisson: the dead girl is a cipher, the young man seemingly catatonic, and their fate wholly unpoignant. The phrase about the “tender beach hoodlum” gives García Márquez's indulgent game away: the world of these stories is one in which the unpleasantness of the real has been painted over, and the thuggish hand that had previously wielded an iron chain now rests luxuriously on the steering-wheel of a Bentley.

Which is not to do reality many favours. García Márquez talks of aiming to write stories “based on journalistic facts that would be redeemed from their mortality by the astute devices of poetry”. But there is nothing either astute or poetic in “The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow”, or in most of the other stories in this collection. Europeans live too much by reason is the moral the stories converge on; they need the strangeness brought by the Latin American intruders, a wilder race who live by the “heart” and, if need be, die by the heart too, in blissful sacrifice to their passions.

The best story in Strange Pilgrims is the first, which is also the longest: “Bon Voyage, Mister President”. It contains nothing fantastic, and in it García Márquez keeps his concentration far better than he does elsewhere. It is set in Geneva, where an aged Caribbean President is living a pinched existence in exile, a Bolívar who has survived and come to Europe instead of dying when he reached the sea. The President is sick and needs an operation, for which he hasn't the money. But he is helped by two of his compatriots, a working-class couple who live meagrely but are sympathetic enough finally to spend some of their savings on returning him to the Caribbean. There are welcome ironies in this story, of a morbid and self-pitying politician who wins over people that should by rights have nothing to do with him and who, once back in the Caribbean, starts dreaming again of being restored to power. I take this wry ending to mean that García Márquez, too, finds dreaming comes naturally in Latin America and that poor prosaic old Europe's job is to see he has the fare to get back there. In Strange Pilgrims, however, the “poetry” by which he offers to ransom everyday facts from their mortality is as journalistic as the facts themselves.