created. Even though “Innocent Eréndira,” “The Sea of Lost Time,” and “Death Constant Beyond Love” tell stories that do not appear in the novel, the strange world of these stories is the same strange world ofOne Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a stark reality presented through the strong sensory perceptions of the characters. The dialogue is scant, as almost everything comes from the omniscient narrator who communicates the characters’ vision of a meta-physical universe in which all things are possible. Thus, when Ulises stabs Eréndira’s grandmother, her blood spurts out oily, shiny, and green, “just like mint honey,” and covers him with “living matter that seemed to be flowing from his fingers” as he tries to wipe it away from his face. The dying Senator Sánchez fashions a butterfly from paper, which flutters about the room, is transformed into a lithograph, and then remains painted indelibly on the wall. The characters participate fully in this unusual reality, accepting it as normal. It is, in fact, a reflection of their hidden instincts and desires. Thus, the actions of these characters are just as marvelous and strange as their surroundings. The senator’s newfound love, Laura Farina, her skin disturbed by a “glacial sweat,” surrenders the key to her iron-padlocked chastity belt in exchange for a favor for her father, and the senator buries his face in her “woods-animal armpit,” giving in to terror and weeping with rage at dying without her.

These are the techniques of literary realism—a wealth of exact detail, a predominance of description, and a thorough analysis of the motivation for the characters’ behavior. García Márquez’ fiction differs from the realistic novels of the nineteenth century, however, in that the reality of his novels and stories is characterized by remarkable magical qualities. For this reason, García Márquez is recognized as a leader of the Latin-American literary movement, Magical Realism (realismo mágico).

Therein lies the problem. The realistic novelist repeats himself constantly as he deals with the everyday, normal world familiar to his readers. No one notices because that world is ordinary and unsurprising. The “magical realist” cannot do the same thing; his world is too surprising and too unfamiliar. Of course, there is a justification for this repetition. If the world really is this way for these characters, it is entirely logical that their perceptions of this would be repetitive. Yet, because the readers surely do not see reality in these terms, the frequent duplication of unusual perceptions does not work very well.

In spite of this major limitation, these three stories are very effective. “Death Constant Beyond Love” is by far the finest of the entire collection. It is a precise, imaginative presentation of the death experience of a man who has spent his life in the self-imposed isolation of a political career.

There are nine stories written during the early period, 1947-1953. One of these, “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” (1950), is different in tone and substance from all the other selections. It is a realistic dialogue between a bartender and a prostitute looking for an alibi to cover up a murder that she has just committed. García Márquez is not successful when he chooses this approach to the creation of fictional reality—his talent lies elsewhere. The other selections in this book reveal how innovative and imaginative he can be when he stays within the limits of the kind of fiction for which he has become famous.

The theme of death dominates the early stories. The first-person narrator of “The Third Resignation” (1947) is facing the moment when he will be “truly dead, or at least, inappreciably alive” after eighteen years in his coffin. The narrator of “Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses” (1953) is a dead boy who stays in his chair in the corner while his childhood friend—the girl who was with him when he died—tends the roses on an altar in his room. Eva, of “Eva Is Inside Her Cat” (1948), is losing her beauty and craves an orange while thinking of the dead boy under the orange tree. She searches for her cat to inhabit its body and thus pass over into the strange, unknown world where all dimensions are eliminated. Finding everything turned to arsenic, she realizes that three thousand years have passed since she first decided to look for the cat. The twin whose brother has died in “The Other Side of Death” (1948) lives “between that noble surface of dreams and realities” and finds that the independence gained through the death of his twin is nullified by the decay of his own body. The old woman of “Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers” (1949) loses her “natural faculty of being present” and wills the elimination of her vital functions, ending herself sense by sense.

Sense by sense: this is an important note to the fiction of García Márquez. His most notable achievement, evident in all his writing from 1949 to the present, is his use of forceful metaphoric language in which the metaphors are consistently sensorial. When one of his characters goes about carrying an “unexpected shadow in profile to her body” and giving off anguished shouts that have “a lot of remembered tree and deep river about them,” the reader gains an impression of thorough knowledge of that character’s interior state. At the same moment, the reader may know that these metaphors add up to a kind of nonsense. Often, it is indeed nonsense in the context of what one character calls “the other world, . . . the mistaken and absurd world of rational creatures.” At other times, the metaphors are clear and delightful. In “Dialogue with the Mirror” (1949), the character who struggles with the opposing forces of the rational and the aesthetic smells breakfast cooking and senses that “a large dog had begun to wag its tail inside his soul.” The man on “The Other Side of Death” feels death begin to flow through his bones “like a river of ashes.”

Through this metaphorical language, García Márquez constructs an unusual universe dominated by perceptions which distort and remold reality according to a heritage of folklore, tradition, and myth passed down through generations to these characters. This process is clearest in One Hundred Years of Solitude and the stories of that period.

The earlier stories do not have the force of the writings of 1968-1972. Although some, such as “Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers,” are very good, they tend to be “set pieces” which seem to lack a context. It is as if they were wrested from some larger work which, given intact, would make them clear and firm.