Picador, 1979, 174 p. Translated from the Spanish El Colonel No Tieme Quien Le Escriba (Aguirre Editor, Colombia, 1961) by J S Bernstein.

This contains the novella, No One Writes to the Colonel (El Colonel No Tieme Quien Le Escriba) and several shorter pieces, Tuesday Siesta, One of These Days, There Are No Thieves in This Town, Balthazar’s Marvellous Afternoon, Montiel’s Widow, One Day after Saturday, Artificial Roses and Big Mama’s Funeral all collected under the umbrella title Big Mama’s Funeral (Los Funerales de la Mama Grande, Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico, 1962.)

They illustrate life in the town of Macondo familiar to those who have read the author’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Indeed the memory of the character of Colonel Aureliano Buendía hangs over each of these stories.

The titular Colonel is living a life of less than genteel poverty while travelling to the wharf every Friday to see the post come in. He is waiting for the pension promised to him for his part in the revolution many, many years ago. But no one writes to the Colonel. His is something of a bleak tale. The rest of the stories are beautifully written vignettes or longer pieces all with a touch of oddness about them. The big mama of the last tale was so notable that even the Pope came to her funeral.

Pedant’s corner:- Translated into USian. “The women examined him” (there was only one woman,) a missing opening quote mark before a piece of direct speech, the early part of page 152 is also printed towards the bottom of page 114 after the end of Balthazar’s Marvellous Afternoon, “rusted zinc” (x 2, zinc does not rust, only iron does that: ‘corroded zinc’ unless the zinc was rust-streaked,) “and leaches to her kidneys” (leeches,)

Penguin, 1996, 166 p. Translated from the Spanish Del amor y otros demonios, (Mondadori, Spain, 1994,) by Edith Grossman.

In a prefatory note Márquez tells us this tale was inspired by his first journalistic assignment – to cover the emptying of the crypts of the old Clarissan convent dedicated to Santa Clara where from one of the tombs tumbled a mass of copper coloured hair, attached to the skull of whom the name on the tomb said was Sierva María de Todos Los Ánǵeles. This reminded Márquez of a story told by his grandmother of a young girl with hair that trailed behind her like a bridal train who had died after being bitten by a rabid dog many years before.

In Márquez’s telling this child is the daughter of Don Ygnacio de Alfaro y Duenas, the second Marquis de Casalduero and Lord of Darien, whose second wife Bernarda Cabrera did not like Sierva María, so she was brought up with the slaves in their quarters and took on many of their beliefs and attitudes. She is indeed bitten by a dog one day in the market and the dog is found to have rabies but Sierva María displays no symptoms even months after and the family’s Doctor Abrenuncio is of the opinion she does not have the disease.

Nevertheless, the local Bishop de Cáceres y Virtudes thinks rabies is an example of demonic possession and insists Sierva María must be exorcised, delegating the task to Cayetano Alcino del Espirítu Santo Delaura y Escudero.

Sierva María is taken to the Clarissan convent where her unconventional (sorry, no pun intended) behaviour convinces the nuns she is indeed possessed. Cayetano soon becomes obsessed with her but can do little to help. Their growing love for each other (even it is not explicit whether or not it was consummated) is a Romeo and Juliet story doomed to fail and her young age coupled with Cayetano’s maturity renders it even more dubious to modern eyes.

In one of many instances here where Márquez implicitly criticises the Church and its practices Dr Abrenuncio says to the Marquis about exorcism, “There is not much difference between that and the witchcraft of the blacks. In fact, it is even worse, because the blacks only sacrifice roosters to their gods, while the Holy Office is happy to break innocents on the rack or burn them alive in a public spectacle.”

The novel also reflects the time in which it is set. About Sierva María’s habit of lying for pleasure Delaura says, “Like the blacks” to which the Marquis replies, “The blacks lie to us but not to each other.”

There is the usual sense of dislocation when reading a Márquez novel. Partly here this is due to Sierva María’s treatment by most of the characters, the main exception being Cayetano, though the Marquis is a lesser one. The background of the Marquis’s life – via his unusual marriages – is tinged with magical realism while Sierva María’s copper hair is an exemplar of the form.

The title suggests love is a demon. Whether it is or not, without it what would literature be?

Sensitivity note: one character thinks of Dr Abrenuncio as a grasping Jew.

Pedant’s corner:- Plus points for ‘autos-da-fe’. “The only security she had left were two urns filled with gold” (The only security she had left was two urns…,) confectionary (confectionery.)

I saw in Saturday’s Guardian that Edith Grossman, translator into English of the works of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa (among others including Miguel de Cervantes) has died.

I have read at least seven of her translations of novels – four of Márquez’s and three of Llosa’s. Ther are more on my tbr pile.

Translation is an art and Grossman was an advocate of translators far from being all but anonymous ought to be considered as at least equal to th eauthor swhom they translate and their names ought to be on the covers of the books they have translated.

Llosa has said of her work: “It doesn’t seem to be a translation of a novel, but something that gives the impression that it has been written originally in English.” For someone reading in English that, of course, is how it should be.

Edith Marion Grossman: 22/31936 – 4/9/2023. So it goes.

Penguin, 2004, 173 p. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa.

This is a collection of the author’s short stories most published from 1948-1953 but some from the 1960s and one from 1970. His characteristic magical realism is to the fore but so too is an emphasis on death.

Lead story The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother is the longest in the book. Eréndira starts off as a young teenage girl (prone to falling asleep on her feet while going about her business) whose widowed grandmother blames her for her house burning down. In order for Eréndira to repay her for her loss the grandmother pimps her out. Various travels ensue among which she procures a certificate of purity from a bishop. Eréndira forms a relationship with Ulises, son of a native mother and a Dutch trader who smuggles diamonds grown inside oranges.
The Sea of Lost Time is a prime example of magical realism, mixing a strange smell coming off the sea with the arrival of the richest man in the world who turns up with suitcases bulging with money which he dispense to the locals who nevertheless end up in debt to him and a swim (without artificial breathing aids) to the bottom of the sea where there is a village.
The first sentence of Death Constant Beyond Love, “Senator Onésimo Sánchez had six months and eleven days to go before his death when he found the woman of his life,” (written in 1961) predates that of Márquez’s most famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” which I commented on here. In this story though the character mentioned in the sentence does feature strongly in the tale.
The Third Resignation tells of a child who has seemingly died but is kept alive by intravenous feeding and housed in a coffin-shaped box.
The Other Side of Death gives us the thoughts of a man whose twin brother’s dead body lies embalmed in the next room.
Eva is Inside Her Cat is the tale of a woman insomniac who imagines herself into the body of her cat.
Dialogue with the Mirror contains the thoughts of a man who sees himself in the mirror, shaving. Or is it himself?
The Bitterness for Three Sleepwalkers is that the woman who has occupied the house they sleep in has died.
Eyes of a Blue Dog are the words two people who dream of each other swear they will use in daytime to recognise each other.
The Woman who Came at Six O’Clock relates a conversation, encompassing love and murder, between a restaurant owner and the woman who always comes into his establishment at six o’clock. Except she insists that this day she was early.
Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses seems to be narrated by a ghost, who waits for the woman who came to live in the room next door to have her Sunday siesta before moving some of the roses she sells to the knoll where his grave lies.
The Night of the Curlews features three men whose eyes have been pecked out by curlews. Though their story had been in the newspapers people don’t believe it.

Pedant’s corner:- Ulises’ mother (Ulises’s,) a bandoleer (bandolier,) martyrized (x 2, martyred,) her virtures (her virtues.)

Picador, 1983, 126 p. Translated from the Spanish, Crónica de una muerte anunciada (La Oveja Negra, Colombia, 1981,) by Gregory Rabasa.

“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on,” is the arresting first sentence of this novel. However, I was immediately struck by its resemblance to the first sentence of the same author’s One Hundred Years of Solitude; a sentence I discussed here, as being a form of authorial cheating.

The corresponding cheat in this book, if in fact it is a cheat, is not so pronounced. We already know someone is to die, the title has told us as much, and that the death is inevitable. (Meanwhile I note that Colonel Aureliano Buendía, presumably the same one from One Hundred Years of Solitude, is mentioned some pages later.) This (short, 122 page, large print) book is an account of the events leading up to that death as related by our unnamed narrator – but there are two textual hints that we are intended to believe that it is the author himself – from recollections he solicited from the witnesses many years after.

It was the day after the wedding of Angelo Vicario and Bayardo San Román and the morning after he had returned her to her parent’s house saying she had not been a virgin. Angelo Vicario had not been impressed with him on their first meeting but the advances of Bayardo San Román, son of an influential family, and a charmer of her parents and brothers Pedro and Pablo had not been easy to refuse. On her furnishing the name of Santiago Nasar as her deflowerer (though the narrator expresses doubts as to the truth of this) Pedro and Pablo resolved to kill him. They lay in wait in the store over the road from his house for him to return from seeing the bishop passing by in his boat.

Most of the people in the town seemed to be aware of their intentions but variously passed them off as drunken boasting, thought they would not carry it through, or that Nasar must already know about it and had taken steps to avoid his fate, or else were unable to see how to prevent it.

The catalogue of happenstance and accident by which the chronicle unfolds is like an inexorable, grinding, avalanche, terrible and tragic in its certainty, but bathetic in detail. Márquez delineates it masterfully.

Pedant’s corner:- proprietess (the usual word to denote a female owner is proprietrix,) organdy (organdie,) Cervantes’ (Cervantes’s.)

Time for Reader in the Wilderness’s meme again.

These shelves contain my paperbacks of fiction translated from languages other than English. Evidence here of my usual suspects – Bohumil Hrabal, Mario Vargas Llosa, Naguib Mahfouz, Diego Marani, Gabriel García Márquez, Irène Némirovsky, Orhan Pamuk, but nearly all of these have been worth reading. In fact I would say there are no real duds here. The English language books on the lower shelf belong to the good lady and are shelved there because they fit into the space:-

Several really large hardbacks are too big to sit on the above shelves so have to be kept separately. These are not all translations but there is more Orhan Pamuk, more Naguib Mahfouz, more Irène Némirovsky, and then the English language Salman Rushdie. The John Updike omnibus is the good lady’s:-

Penguin, 2014, 119 p. Translated from the Spanish Memoria de mis putas tristes (Mondadori, Barcelona, 2005) by Edith Grossman

The title strongly suggests this (short) novel will address at least two of literature’s big three themes. Sex certainly and, if not death, then at least old age. And it does so from the first sentence, where our narrator reveals that the year he turned ninety he, “wanted to give himself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” A columnist on a Colombian newspaper, this is a man who has always paid for the women he has had sex with – even if they threw the money on the floor straight away.

He contacts his madam of choice, Rosa Cabarcas, to arrange the contract. In the event, though, when he enters the room the child is sleeping and he does nothing to disturb her. Instead he begins to idolise her and reminisce about his past life.

That title is slightly misleading, there is not actually much about whores in the 119 pages, whether melancholy or otherwise. What there is, are the ruminations of an old man on life, love and obsession, thus hitting squarely on literature’s third big theme. Of women he says, “they know the how and the why when they want to,” and of ageing as a man, “among the charms of old age are the provocations our young female friends permit themselves because they think we are out of commission.” There is also some wit. The state censor at the newspaper, altogether too fond of striking his pen through the whole of a piece of copy, is dubbed the Abominable No-Man.

It is definitely the work of a writer who knew thoroughly what he was doing and how to achieve his ends but also with the sly urge to provoke.

Pedant’s corner:- “the incipient down on her pubis” (the pubis is the pubic bone, not the genital area. The external prominence is the Mons pubis.) “The best part of her body were her large, silent stepping feet” (the best part was,) Praxiteles’ (Praxiteles’s,) Heraclitus’ (Heraclitus’s.)

Windmill, 2015, 378 p.

When I started this it read like some sort of odd fusion between Michael Chabon and Gabriel García Márquez. Why? Well, there’s the boy whose great interest is in comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay). Then the viewpoint character is referred to all but exclusively as “the Sergeant” (The General in his Labyrinth) and the setting is exotic – to me at least. The island of Mancreu in the north part of the Indian Ocean. The Sergeant has seen (messy) service in Afghanistan, Iraq and Bosnia and been farmed out to the island as a British Brevet-Consul with strict instructions to do, or interfere with, nothing. Yet in his new home he has a quasi-police role. Think Death in Paradise with all the twee bits ruthlessly excised except in a different ocean and a menacing air to the whole island.

For Mancreu has been the subject of an environmental disaster in its subterranean magma well (all sorts of undesirable biological emanations now proceed from there at irregular intervals) and is under sentence of death, “so wretchedly polluted that it must be sterilised by fire,” by the international community. People have already left – Leaving parties de rigueur – and the rest of the population is only biding its time. On land an international force known as NatProMan has a sort of rules-enforcement function. Offshore a Black Fleet is up to no good and tales circulate of a criminal/pirate/underworld type dubbed Bad Jack who lurks in the island’s shadows.

The Sergeant has developed a fatherly interest in the boy – who seems to have no parents but is liberally supplied with comic books and speaks fluent comic. In a meta-fictional moment the boy says of the stories in the comics, “There must be development-over-time or it is just noise.”

Things are shaken up when a bunch of gunmen come into Shola’s bar (where the Sergeant and the boy go to take tea) and shooting starts. Shola is killed but the Sergeant protects the boy with a nifty piece of action using for a weapon a tin containing custard powder which he employs as a sort of grenade. It explodes when the gunmen fire at it in defence. This gives the Sergeant the opportunity to overwhelm the remaining gunmen.

After the Sergeant discovers the boy – who may be called Robin but then again that could be a Batman joke – has been severely beaten and some of his comics systematically ripped apart as a punishment they cook up a plan between them. Inspired by the Sergeant’s somewhat magic realist encounter with a tiger (which he has related to the boy) the Sergeant, with the aid of a mask and some painted body armour, will become “Tigerman” to deal with the island’s bad guys. After all, “Myths and monsters were a human weakness, even on places not about to be evacuated and sterilised by fire.”

The plot sharpens when a missile is fired from the Black Fleet onto the building where the arrested gunmen are being held but it kind of jumped the shark later when the exact relationship between the boy and Bad Jack is revealed.

Along the way the NatProMan chief ruminates, “You had to listen to what a Brit was saying – which was invariably that he thought X Y Z was a terrific idea and he hoped it went well for you – while at the same time paying heed to the greasy, nauseous suspicion you had that, although every word and phrase indicated approval, somehow the sum of the whole was that you’d have to be a mental pygmy to come up with this plan and a complete fucking idiot to pursue it…. they didn’t do it on purpose. Brits actually thought that subtext was plain text.”

The last few pages strive for an emotional reaction from the reader but Harkaway hasn’t done quite enough in the preceding ones to earn it which is a shame as I really liked his previous novel Angelmaker.

Pedant’s corner:- Bad Jack is at one point rendered in French as Mauvais Jacques. I had always thought Jacques was French for James, as in Jacobite, not Jack. Otherwise; the Sergeant is told to “rest up” by the previous Consul (rest up is a USianism, a Brit would more likely say rest,) “which he could use about now” (use is an USianism; ‘which he could do with about now’,)”the bigness of this idea”(x2; what an ugly expression,) mortician (undertaker,) sit-uations (not at a line break so situations,) with with (only one with required,) Freddy Mercury (Freddie Mercury,) “‘She wants a friendly face, is all’” (is all is USian, a Brit would say, ‘that’s all’,) a missing comma before the end quote mark of a piece of dialogue and another missing before a new piece, phosphorous flares (phosphorus,) there were a lot of positions (there were lots of positions.)

Penguin, 2014, 290 p, including i p map of New Granada, iv p author’s thanks and xi p Chronology of Simón Bolívar. No translator given but it is most likely Edith Grossman as she was the translator for the Jonathan Cape edition from which the original Penguin paperback was derived. First published as El General en Su Laberinto, Mondadori Espana, 1989.

This, an account of the last days of Simón Bolívar, The Liberator, on his final trip down the Magdalena River from Santa Fe de Bogotá to the sea, is not typical Márquez. There is no hint of magic realism here and the book often reads more like a history than a novel. In that it is a portrait of a leader in decline it bears some similarities to The Autumn of the Patriarch but it would not do to stretch the parallel. In any case, unlike that novel, this one is not at all experimental in its writing. Márquez’s Bolivar (his name is only given once, and then in full, Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar y Palacios) – known throughout as simply the General – is all too human, his wife’s untimely death, without which he may never have embarked on his adventures into history, locked away inside him, yet his liaisons with women legendary.

The novel starts in Santa Fe de Bogotá as the General, his hopes of uniting the lands of South America (certainly the former Spanish parts) into one country now lying in tatters, is awaiting Government permission to leave and go to Europe. At a gathering, “No one was certain, however, who was there for the sake of friendship, who in order to protect him, and who to be sure that in fact he was leaving.”

The details of the journey downriver are intercut with scenes from his life and military and governmental careers wherein Márquez has the opportunity to comment on the condition of being a military strong man, or any dictator. When official reports had led the General to believe the scourge of smallpox was being conquered, evidence to the contrary has him say, “‘It will always be like this as long as subordinates lie to make us happy.’”

The General is also biting about any criticism of the harsh measures he had taken in his campaigns, “‘Europeans would not have the moral authority to reproach me, for, if any history is drowned in blood, indignity, and injustice, it is the history of Europe,’” the difficulties of running a newly founded country, “‘I warned (General) Santander that whatever good we had done for the nation would be worthless if we took on debt because we would go on paying interest till the end of time. Now it’s clear: debt will destroy us in the end.’” In a letter he tells another General that, “Every civil war had been won by the side that was most savage.” Then to an aide, “‘Don’t go with your family to the United States. It’s omnipotent and terrible, and its tale of liberty will end in a plague of miseries for us all.’” Despite all his achievements he reflects ruefully, “‘It was not the perfidy of my enemies but the diligence of my friends that destroyed my glory.’”

An item I found curious is that Bolivar was initiated in Paris as a Mason “of the Scottish rite”. Odd how often Scotland pops up in these South American fictions.

The novel’s title is an allusion to the General’s last words which were, “‘How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!’” It is, of course, the same way as the rest of us.

This was obviously a subject to which Márquez felt he had to turn, taking up the idea from an unfinished work by his friend Álvaro Mutis. to chronicle the end of a life which may as well be a myth.

Pedant’s corner:- to not deprive (not to deprive,) Elbers’ (Elbers’s,) Andrés’ (Andrés’s,) Páez’ (Páez’s,) Palacios’ (Palacios’s,) duchess’ (duchess’s,) Valdehoyos’ (Valdehoyos’s,) Sáenz’ (Sáenz’s,) English and British are used almost interchangeably, Britain is nearly always referred to as England.

Penguin, 2014, 233 p. Translated from the Spanish El Otoño del Patriarca, 1975, by Gregory Rabassa.

It would be difficult to review this book without considering its form and structure, which are not for the faint-hearted, demanding concentration from the reader. There are six sections in all and each one consists of but a single long paragraph containing meandering sentences ranging up to several pages or more in length. Indeed the last section had just one sentence stretching over 45 pages. Within these digressive sentences the narrative viewpoint frequently switches back and forth, neither is there dialogue in the conventional sense, only reports of speech – perhaps interspersed with a “general sir”, or other vocative interpolation, to indicate that the preceding phrase is supposed to have been spoken. But for those viewpoint changes (some of which are in the plural) the prose could almost be described as stream of consciousness – or even stream of unconsciousness as one interpretation is that it represents the patriarch’s last thoughts; his life flashing past him as it ebbs away, “he was condemned not to know life except in reverse,” imagining again the events that brought him to his lonely end.

The autumn of the title is the long period of decay during which the (unnamed and, reportedly, absurdly long-lived,) patriarch retreated into solitude and his power rested on his reputation. The litany of atrocities and sexual peccadillos is what you might expect from a man of this sort, though he is portrayed as having an affection for both his mother, Bendicíon Alvarado, and the woman, Leticia Nazareno, he plucked from being a novitiate to share his bed.

The hall of mirrors that is living under a dictatorship is illustrated by lines such as, “We knew no evidence of his death was final, because there was always another truth behind the truth,” and “a lie is more comfortable than doubt, more useful than love, more lasting than truth,” and “the belief that the less people understand the more afraid they’ll be.” These are lessons always needing to be learned it would seem. There is also an odd passage where we are told the patriarch had had “brought from Scotland eighty-two new born bulldogs …evilly taught to kill by a Scottish trainer.” I wondered why Márquez had chosen Scotland; it’s not particularly known for bulldogs.

The Autumn of the Patriarch is an exercise in form and experiment bearing few of the easy consolations of a conventional novel. It’s a tour-de-force certainly, but it’s not one for the casual reader.

A word for the translator, Gregory Rabassa. This must have been a particularly tricky book to translate and he has done a magnificent job. Rabassa was credited by Márquez of making the English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude superior to the original Spanish. Sadly, he died in June 2016. So it goes.

And a warning for those who wish to avoid the n-word, in which case don’t read the next sentence. The phrase “nigger whorehouse” appears in the text.

Pedant’s corner:- nowthat (now that,) bureaus (I prefer bureaux,) convenience’ sake (convenience’s sake,) insignias (insignia. Is insignias USian?)