Strange Pilgrims

Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) is widely considered one of the most important authors of the 20th century. He was born in Aracataca, a village in the Caribbean region of Colombia, and was raised there primarily by his maternal grandparents until 1936, when his father took back custody. García Márquez was profoundly influenced by his grandparents’ values. His grandfather was a former colonel and a hero to the Colombian Liberals. He taught García Márquez to value human life and intellectual growth and planted the seeds of the leftist political views García Márquez would hold all of his life. His grandmother taught him to believe in the miraculous and to leave room for the possibility of the supernatural in everyday life. Her ability to tell fantastical stories as if they were absolutely factual significantly influenced García Márquez’s later writing style.

García Márquez studied law for a time, but eventually his love for writing won out, and he began working as a journalist. He joined a writer’s group known as the Barranquilla Group, the members of which inspired García Márquez greatly and spurred him to consider a serious literary career. He began working on a novella, Leaf Storm, which was eventually published in 1955. The next year, he moved to Europe, where he stayed for just over two years, living in Paris and traveling widely. This is the period that García Márquez refers to in the Prologue of Strange Pilgrims, where he notes how Europe has changed since he lived there as a young man.

When he returned to Colombia, he married Mercedes Barcha; afterward, the couple moved around Latin America—Venezuela, Cuba, and Mexico. Their two sons were born in this period, and García Márquez met and befriended several influential figures, such as Fidel Castro and Carlos Fuentes. As the years went on, García Márquez divided his time between Mexico and Colombia. His career as a novelist and short story author flourished. His many works include seminal novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985), novellas such as Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), short stories such as “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” (1968) and “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” (1968), and more than two dozen films. He is also the recipient of many prestigious awards, including the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 1972 Rómulo Gallegos International Novel Prize, the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1980 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service for Literature.

García Márquez’s works have had a significant impact on the world of literature. They helped bring Latin American fiction to a global audience; García Márquez is among the most-translated Spanish-language authors in literary history. His works also helped introduce the world to magical realism, a style of writing originating in Latin America that blends realistic settings with mythic and supernatural elements that convey the spiritual and cultural realities that underpin these settings. Strange Pilgrims contains many such elements—such as the incorruptible body of a deceased child, ghosts, prophetic dreams and visions, and light that functions like water.