I find with short stories that you’re left wanting more. Like a delicious entrée, the ingredients and dedication is there but it is short lasting leaving a wonderful taste on your tongue and eagerness for the next spoonful.
This was my small dilemma whilst reading ‘Bon Voyage, Mr President and Other Stories’, written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and published by Penguin Books in 1995. 58 pages divided by 4 stories of family, desire, being a foreigner, and life’s quirks, all compacted by the easy flow of Garcia Marquez’s penmanship.
Like an Actimel, this miniature book is made of great content. The first story introduced to us is Bon Voyage, Mr President; the story of a 73 year old exiled Caribbean president whose decaying health takes him to Europe and later to the house of a humble family of ex-patriots. The story focuses on the nature of being an immigrant and moral political conflicts.
Von Voyage, Mr President is followed by Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane. A story loosely based on the Colombian writer’s experience in a Parisian airport. The protagonist falls in love at first sight with a beautiful woman and destiny has it to seat them together on the plane to New York. A few pages covering love, voyeurism and self-restrain. My favourite sentence was a bitter-sweet one – left without even saying good-bye or at least thanking me for all I had done to make our night together a happy one. Humour for us is the protagonist’s miserable reality.
These two stories were first featured in Strange Pilgrims (Doce Cuentos Pelegrinos), an assembly of twelve loosely self-based short stories written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and published in 1992.
The penultimate story is a sad and complicated sequence of events that lead Maria de la Luz Cervantes to be sectioned at a religious mental health hospital. I Only Came to Use the Phone tells the tale of how a small error in identity leads to an enormous life changing route. It is frightening how easily this could happen, and how defenceless we can be, in the addition to the consequences of ‘crying wolf’ too many times.
The fourth and ending story is closer to Garcia Marquez’s magic realism style of writing. It follows the life of a 4 member family and how the children’s determination and imagination can result in breath-taking situations.
This small sample into the writer’s world touches on subjects that everyone can relate to and can result in a change of direction. A beautiful book to read when in between books or when in need of a short term change in literature.
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