Reviews

Collected Stories by Gabriel García Márquez

wilbobaggins's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

draxin's review

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dark funny fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

The whole book consisted of the stories that screamed they were written for funsies.

cb613's review

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adventurous challenging dark mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

motifenjoyer's review against another edition

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mysterious reflective

4.0

"While he was sinking into delirium. When he had read the tales of embalmed pharaohs. As his fever rose, he felt himself to be the protagonist. A kind of emptiness in his life had begun there. From then on he had been unable to distinguish, to remember what events were part of his delirium and what were part of his real life."

fishface's review

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challenging mysterious reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I really enjoyed this anthology, it feels like you have a little Gabriel García Márquez in a petri dish and you get to watch him grow from his unclear yet still striking early work to the beautiful stories from the last collection. The sea of lost time was probably my favourite :)

waveszz's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging funny mysterious relaxing medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

freshbatchofbooks's review

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challenging

3.5

eitaknnif's review

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challenging dark emotional funny reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character

5.0

GGM is a master. These stories are vivid and often painful, fanciful and deadly, occasionally hilarious, always brutal. The setting (land and weather) is vital, almost the main character. An excellent read, though I had to take it slow because each piece was so thought provoking I found it impossible to read straight through. 

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smithjasont01's review

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dark funny mysterious reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

"Since it's Sunday and it's stopped raining, I think I'll take a bouquet of roses to my grave."

A collection of 26 short stories pulled from other works of his and placed in chronological order.  We get to see Marquez writing throughout his life and see his prose and themes evolve over time.  Rife with the magical realism that he is known for as well as characters from other stories popping up from time to time this collection is a great display of his writing for both new and old readers of Marquez.  

The theme of death was abound throughout the collection with my favorite being Someone has been Disarranging These Rose, about a ghost watching a women mourn his life for years while tending roses in his house.  The Woman Who Came at Six O'clock was another strong one in the first book about a woman who got mixed up with a bad lover and wants the help of a barkeeper to take care of him.  

Book 2 was in my opinion the weakest set but still had some good stories like Teusday Siesta about a mother having to bury her son who was mistakenly killed as a robber, as well as Big Mama's Funeral the story and history of a wealthy matriarch told at her funeral.

Book 3 was my favorite set of stories.  Starting out strong with A very old man with enormous wings about an angel who washes up on shore and is then exploited by a poor family.  Then The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World about a giant anonymous drowned man whom the towns people find and fall in love with and adopt as one of their own so he is not alone in death.  Then ending with The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother, a story about love, exploitation, and family as a young girl is forced by her grandmother to repay her debts by selling herself only to fall in love with a young man but when that young man fulfills a promise she is driven to madness.

It was great to jump back into Marquez' writings.

katmystery's review

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2.0

When it takes me over two years to get through a 350 page book, there is something seriously wrong.

My first attempt at reading GGM was Love in the Time of Cholera, which I DNF'd halfway through. I tried again with this collection. There were a handful of stories in here that I found beautiful and haunting, my favorite being The Sea of Lost Time, but the rest left much to be desired. Most stories were dull at best, and some were downright disturbing.

GGM's writing, on the sentence level, is undeniably beautiful- the descriptions are evocative, the ambiance is strong, and the magic is folded effortlessly into the real-world setting. However, the characters are all the same- there are three or four character types that GGM uses religiously, making no one memorable or unique from the others- and, moreover, none of these character types are likable. Though I'm sure there were metaphors baked into the stories, I didn't grasp the grand majority of them.

While fantasy amplifies universal concepts (e.g. nature, love, power), magical realism distorts reality to give a voice to the everyday and mundane in all of its beautiful, brutal glory. As such, it is more focused on painting concepts with metaphors and allegory and making you think, rather than following a clear plot. I see the allure of this, but it's not my thing.