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Eyes of a Blue Dog
Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs.
After that I
Ojos de Perro Azul = Eyes of a Blue Dog, Gabriel García Márquez Eyes of a Blue Dog
Then she looked at me. I thought that she was looking at me for the first time. But then, when she turned around behind the lamp and I kept feeling her slippery and oily look in back of me, over my shoulder, I understood that it was I who was looking at her for the first time. I lit a cigarette. I took a drag on the harsh, strong smoke, before spinning in the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs.
After that I saw her there, as if she'd been standing beside the lamp looking at me every night. For a few brief minutes that's all we did: look at each other. I looked from the chair, balancing on one of the rear legs. She stood, with a long and quiet hand on the lamp, looking at me. I saw her eyelids lighted up as on every night. It was then that I remembered the usual thing, when I said to her: "Eyes of a blue dog." Without taking her hand off the lamp she said to me: "That. We'll never forget that." She left the orbit, sighing: "Eyes of a blue dog. I've written it everywhere."
I saw her walk over to the dressing table. I watched her appear in the circular glass of the mirror looking at me now at the end of a back and forth of mathematical light. I watched her keep on looking at me with her great hot-coal eyes: looking at me while she opened the little box covered with pink mother of pearl.
I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: "I'm afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets." And over the flame she held the same long and tremulous hand that she had been warming before sitting down at the mirror. And she said: "You don't feel the cold." And I said to her: "Sometimes." And she said to me: "You must feel it now." And then I understood why I couldn't have been alone in the seat. It was the cold that had been giving me the certainty of my solitude. "Now I feel it," I said. "And it's strange because the night is quiet.
Maybe the sheet fell off." She didn't answer. Again she began to move toward the mirror and I turned again in the chair, keeping my back to her. Without seeing her, I knew what she was doing. I knew that she was sitting in front of the mirror again, seeing my back, which had had time to reach the depths of the mirror and be caught by her look, which had also had just enough time to reach the depths and return--before the hand had time to start the second turn--until her lips were anointed now with crimson, from the first turn of her hand in front of the mirror.
I saw, opposite me, the smooth wall, which was like another blind mirror in which I couldn't see her--sitting behind me--but could imagine her where she probably was as if a mirror had been hung in place of the wall. "I see you," I told her. And on the wall I saw what was as if she had raised her eyes and had seen me with my back turned toward her from the chair, in the depths of the mirror, my face turned toward the wall.
Then I saw her lower her eyes again and remain with her eyes always on her brassiere, not talking. And I said to her again: "I see you." And she raised her eyes from her brassiere again. "That's impossible," she said. I asked her why. And she, with her eyes quiet and on her brassiere again: "Because your face is turned toward the wall." Then I spun the chair around.
I had the cigarette clenched in my mouth. When I stayed facing the mirror she was back by the lamp. Now she had her hands open over the flame, like the two wings of a hen, toasting herself, and with her face shaded by her own fingers. "I think I'm going to catch cold," she said. "This must be a city of ice." She turned her face to profile and her skin, from copper to red, suddenly became sad. "Do something about it," she said. And she began to get undressed, item by item, starting at the top with the brassiere. I told her: "I'm going to turn back to the wall."
She said: "No. In any case, you'll see me the way you did when your back was turned." And no sooner had she said it than she was almost completely undressed, with the flame licking her long copper skin. "I've always wanted to see you like that, with the skin of your belly full of deep pits, as if you'd been beaten." And before I realized that my words had become clumsy at the sight of her nakedness she became motionless, warming herself on the globe of the lamp, and she said: "Sometimes I think I'm made of metal." She was silent for an instant. The position of her hands over the flame varied slightly.
I said: "Sometimes in other dreams, I've thought you were only a little bronze statue in the corner of some museum. Maybe that's why you're cold." And she said: "Sometimes, when I sleep on my heart, I can feel my body growing hollow and my skin is like plate. Then, when the blood beats inside me, it's as if someone were calling by knocking on my stomach and I can feel my own copper sound in the bed. It's like--what do you call it--laminated metal." She drew closer to the lamp. "I would have liked to hear you," I said. And she said: "If we find each other sometime, put your ear to my ribs when I sleep on the left side and you'll hear me echoing.
I've always wanted you to do it sometime." I heard her breathe heavily as she talked. And she said that for years she'd done nothing different. Her life had been dedicated to finding me in reality, through that identifying phrase: "Eyes of a blue dog." And she went along the street saying it aloud, as a way of telling the only person who could have understood her:
"I'm the one who comes into your dreams every night and tells you: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'" And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: "Eyes of a blue dog." But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams.
Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: "Eyes of a blue dog." And on the steamed-up windows of hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: "Eyes of a blue dog." She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell that she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. "He must be near," she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore.
Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: "I always dream about a man who says to me: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'" And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: "As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that." And she said to him: "I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams." And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter. She kept on seeing the clean tile and smelling the odor. And she opened her purse and on the tiles with her crimson lipstick, she wrote in red letters: "Eyes of a blue dog." The clerk came back from where he had been.
He told her: Madam, you have dirtied the tiles." He gave her a damp cloth, saying: "Clean it up." And she said, still by the lamp, that she had spent the whole afternoon on all fours, washing the tiles and saying: "Eyes of a blue dog," until people gathered at the door and said she was crazy.
Now, when she finished speaking, I remained in the corner, sitting, rocking in the chair. "Every day I try to remember the phrase with which I am to find you," I said. "Now I don't think I'll forget it tomorrow. Still, I've always said the same thing and when I wake up I've always forgotten what the words I can find you with are." And she said: "You invented them yourself on the first day." And I said to her: "I invented them because I saw your eyes of ash. But I never remember the next morning." And she, with clenched fists, beside the lamp, breathed deeply: "If you could at least remember now what city I've been writing it in."
Her tightened teeth gleamed over the flame. "I'd like to touch you now," I said. She raised the face that had been looking at the light; she raised her look, burning, roasting, too, just like her, like her hands, and I felt that she saw me, in the corner where I was sitting, rocking in the chair. "You'd never told me that," she said. "I tell you now and it's the truth," I said. From the other side of the lamp she asked for a cigarette. The butt had disappeared between my fingers. I'd forgotten I was smoking. She said: "I don't know why I can't remember where I wrote it." And I said to her: "For the same reason that tomorrow I won't be able to remember the words." And she said sadly: "No. It's just that sometimes I think that I've dreamed that too."
I stood up and walked toward the lamp. She was a little beyond, and I kept on walking with the cigarettes and matches in my hand, which would not go beyond the lamp. I held the cigarette out to her. She squeezed it between her lips and leaned over to reach the flame before I had time to light the match. "In some city in the world, on all the walls, those words have to appear in writing: 'Eyes of a blue dog," I said. "If I remembered them tomorrow I could find you." She raised her head again and now the lighted coal was between her lips. "Eyes of a blue dog," she sighed, remembered, with the cigarette drooping over her chin and one eye half closed.
Then she sucked in the smoke with the cigarette between her fingers and exclaimed: "This is something else now. I'm warming up." And she said it with her voice a little lukewarm and fleeting, as if she hadn't really said it, but as if she had written it on a piece of paper and had brought the paper close to the flame while I read: "I'm warming," and she had continued with the paper between her thumb and forefinger, turning it around as it was being consumed and I had just read ". . . up," before the paper was completely consumed and dropped all wrinkled to the floor, diminished, converted into light ash dust. "That's better," I said. "Sometimes it frightens me to see you that way. Trembling beside a lamp."
We had been seeing each other for several years. Sometimes, when we were already together, somebody would drop a spoon outside and we would wake up. Little by little we'd been coming to understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings. Our meetings always ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early in the morning.
Now, next to the lamp, she was looking at me. I remembered that she had also looked at me in that way in the past, from that remote dream where I made the chair spin on its back legs and remained facing a strange woman with ashen eyes.
It was in that dream that I asked her for the first time: "Who are you?" And she said to me: "I don't remember." I said to her: "But I think we've seen each other before." And she said, indifferently: "I think I dreamed about you once, about this same room." And I told her: "That's it. I'm beginning to remember now." And she said: "How strange. It's certain that we've met in other dreams."
She took two drags on the cigarette. I was still standing, facing the lamp, when suddenly I kept looking at her. I looked her up and down and she was still copper; no longer hard and cold metal, but yellow, soft, malleable copper. "I'd like to touch you," I said again. And she said: "You'll ruin everything." I said: "It doesn't matter now. All we have to do is turn the pillow in order to meet again." And I held my hand out over the lamp. She didn't move. "You'll ruin everything," she said again before I could touch her. "Maybe, if you come around behind the lamp, we'd wake up frightened in who knows what part of the world."
But I insisted: "It doesn't matter." And she said: "If we turned over the pillow, we'd meet again. But when you wake up you'll have forgotten." I began to move toward the corner. She stayed behind, warming her hands over the flame. And I still wasn't beside the chair when I heard her say behind me: "When I wake up at midnight, I keep turning in bed, with the fringe of the pillow burning my knee, and repeating until dawn: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'"
Then I remained with my face toward the wall. "It's already dawning," I said without looking at her. "When it struck two I was awake and that was a long time back." I went to the door. When I had the knob in my hand, I heard her voice again, the same, invariable. "Don't open that door," she said. "The hallway is full of difficult dreams." And I asked her: "How do you know?" And she told me: "Because I was there a moment ago and I had to come back when I discovered I was sleeping on my heart." I had the door half opened.
I moved it a little and a cold, thin breeze brought me the fresh smell of vegetable earth, damp fields. She spoke again. I gave the turn, still moving the door, mounted on silent hinges, and I told her: "I don't think there's any hallway outside here.
I'm getting the smell of country." And she, a little distant, told me: "I know that better than you. What's happening is that there's a woman outside dreaming about the country." She crossed her arms over the flame. She continued speaking: "It's that woman who always wanted to have a house in the country and was never able to leave the city." I remembered having seen the woman in some previous dream, but I knew, with the door ajar now, that within half an hour I would have to go down for breakfast. And I said: "In any case, I have to leave here in order to wake up." ....
عنوانهای چاپ شده در ایران: «زنی که هر روز راس ساعت شش صبح میآمد»؛ «چشمان آبی رنگ سگ»؛ نویسنده گابریل گارسیا مارکز؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش روز بیست و سوم ماه آوریل سال1993میلادی؛ تاریخ دومین خوانش روز بیست و پنجم ماه ژوئن سال2003میلادی
عنوان: چشمان آبی رنگ سگ؛ نویسنده: گابریل گارسیا مارکز؛ مترجم شاهرخ فرزاد؛ تبریز، ایرانویچ، سال1371؛ در140ص
عنوان: زنی که هر روز راس ساعت شش صبح میآمد؛ نویسنده: گابریل گارسیا مارکز؛ مترجم: نیکیتا تیموری؛ تهران، نشر شیرین، سال1378؛ در160ص؛ شابک9645564395؛ چاپ دوم سال1379؛ چاپ دیگر تهران، آریابان، سال1381؛ شابک9647196156؛ چاپ پنجم سال1386؛ شابک9789647196156؛ چاپ هفتم سال1389؛ چاپ یازدهم سال1393؛ موضوع داستانهای کوتاه از نویسندگان کلمبیا - سده20م
فهرست داستانها: «زنی که هر روز راس ساعت شش صبح میامد!»، «ایوا درون گربه ی خویش»، «بی شک شخصی این گلهای سرخ را پرپر کرده است!»، «آن روی دیگر مرگ»، «گفتگو با آیینه»، «چشمان آبی رنگ سگ»، «لک لک ها در نیمه شب»، «نابسامانی های سه احمق»، «مشکلات ایزابل در زیر بارانهای ماکوندو»، «سومین تسلیم»، «نابو: مردی سیاه که فرشته ها را در انتظار نگه داشت».؛ داستانها همگی درباره ی «مرک» هستند
تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 27/09/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ 13/09/1400هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی
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These short pieces can be seen as the necessary gathering of ingredients and of the practice of perfecting their measure, which would eventually go into the making of his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as his other lesser works.
Death and decay, memory and madness, time and its passing – here, the young Marquez leads the reader away from the mistaken and absurd world of rational creatures into a world where preconceive
"...the mistaken and absurd world of rational creatures."These short pieces can be seen as the necessary gathering of ingredients and of the practice of perfecting their measure, which would eventually go into the making of his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as his other lesser works.
Death and decay, memory and madness, time and its passing – here, the young Marquez leads the reader away from the mistaken and absurd world of rational creatures into a world where preconceived notions about everything are shattered and dismissed as facile. And you're pulled into a fascinating maze which is scary and scintillating at the same time.
At least three stories stood out for me. The opening story The Third Resignation, with its claustrophobic ruminations of a man beyond the grave who doesn't know he's dead (what a premise!). In Nabo: The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait, Marquez explores the loss of sanity of a man crushed under the twin burdens of racism and poverty, perhaps even slavery. And the third story that struck a chord was Monologue of Isabel Watching it Rain in Macondo. Yes, Macondo didn't come into existence with One Hundred Years…; it came into being the moment Marquez picked up his pen for the very first time.
One may make a case that these stories are best appreciated after you have already read Marquez's stellar works and are well-acquainted with his major themes. For these are his earliest fictions written in the 1940s and early '50s, when hardly anyone was writing this kind of stuff.
In any case a genuine talent was in the making and the passing of time proved it.
January '21
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The very worked style adapts well to the morbidity of the subjects; the stories are complex. It is a beautiful little fantastic, dreamlike novel, but it should not abuse it. Something is terrifying about Marquez's style.
The very worked style adapts well to the morbidity of the subjects; the stories are complex. It is a beautiful little fantastic, dreamlike novel, but it should not abuse it. ...more
The anthology was published in 1974 but the shorts stories within were all written before 1955. One of these stories, The monologue of Isabel watching the rain falling on Macondo, represents the first mention and the foundati
This is a wonderful anthology containing some of the earliest short stories written by Garcia Marquez. Yes, these are some of the first stories he wrote, but that doesn't make them any less good, on the contrary, some of them are simply magic, full of his raw love for words.The anthology was published in 1974 but the shorts stories within were all written before 1955. One of these stories, The monologue of Isabel watching the rain falling on Macondo, represents the first mention and the foundation stone to what would become 100 years of Solitude.
Along this anthology one can see Marquez's style changing, from his early stories settle in a haunting supernatural world to a more subtle kind of magic, one that almost feels like real life. Reading this book it's easy to understand how magic realism evolve to become the genre and literary current it's nowadays.
I have some favorites:
Eva is inside her cat, is a haunting, claustrophobic tale. Is she dead, alive, dreaming, sleep waking, did she kill a boy (her boy) or has he been dead for centuries, or is she really a spirit with fragmented images of what once her life now possessing a cat? You don't know and you don't need to know, because the not knowing makes reading this story all the better. And I bet you'll crave an orange after you're done reading.
Eyes of a blue dog, this one gives name to the anthology and with good reason. This is a tale of obsession and sadness and loneliness, of a woman in love with someone she dreams about every night. They are both real, she knows it, and he loves her too. But they don't know each other in real life, and everyday he forgets she exists. When awake, she can't remember how he looks or his name, she only knows what he once told her, that she has the eyes of a blue dog. This story is one that stays with me for days each time after I've read it. It has that incoherent but perfectly understandable quality dreams have, and like dreams it follows you around. If you never get to read this anthology cover to cover, at least find Eyes like a blue dog and read it, it is so worth it.
Monologue of Isabel watching the rain falling on Macondo, this one is the latest of all the stories. Here, Marquez writing is already well settled into the style of his novels. The claustrophobia and dreamy incoherence are gone, replace by a subtle pull into un-reality. This is a story that transports us to a new place, a place that may be very different from our everyday life but that through Isabel's eyes feels familiar, like a home, a magic one.
If you don't feel like taking on Marquez novels, give these stories a chance. You may get hook on magic realism.
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The trouble with a short story collection is that not all are always of equal quality, and this collection is a good example of that. I'd highlight some stories, which I thought were great (The Third Resignation, Eyes of a Blue Dog, Nabo, and Someone has been disarranging these Roses), but mostly I was very confused and bored by recurring themes of death, resignation, decline, deterioration, confusion of senses, or heavy reliance upon the sense of smell, state between life and death (unawareness
The trouble with a short story collection is that not all are always of equal quality, and this collection is a good example of that. I'd highlight some stories, which I thought were great (The Third Resignation, Eyes of a Blue Dog, Nabo, and Someone has been disarranging these Roses), but mostly I was very confused and bored by recurring themes of death, resignation, decline, deterioration, confusion of senses, or heavy reliance upon the sense of smell, state between life and death (unawareness of one's death or unwillingness to cross to the side of "full death" as opposed to lingering in a form of a ghost-like presence), out of body experience, dream-like atmosphere etc., etc.
Marquez has fantastic opening sentences which grab you to read on, his writing style is immaculate, the word play is a joy to witness, but the ambiguous, surrealist images which exemplify the genre of magic realism (even though I love magical realism) were a tad too much for me this time around.
If you want truly good short stories by M. read The Very Old Man with Enormous Wings and The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother.
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The first story he has ever written is great: "The third resignation" – it is a spark of a great author to be. Th
This collection of short stories is amazing. It is a Marquez like I have never seen before. Ok, some of the things can be recognized, but there is something so different. The profoundness is still there. Another thing in these short stories is the appeal to the antecedents – they are seen at a cosmic scale, being the biblical patriarchs. This will be a giant theme in Marquez`s works.The first story he has ever written is great: "The third resignation" – it is a spark of a great author to be. The first two pages create a "bacovian" atmosphere to me (George Bacovia – poet, symbolism) and I got some feelings like those when I was reading poetry. The poetic atmosphere is not just in my mind because, as I learned after-wards, at the time Marquez has written this he was greatly influenced by the poems he read.
"Tubal Cain makes a star" is the only story I do not like (and I do not get) from this collection.
"The other side of death" is another magnum short-opus: it concerns the duality theme. Check out this metaphor for the amniotic liquid from the womb: "the deep liquid night from the motherly belly". The style is like this: the author writes at the third person, sg, and then suddenly switches to first person speaking. Not only that but before and after switching, within brackets he used the other form so you almost do not notice the switch!
"How does Nathanael make a visit" is the most "funny" among these dark stories: the little boy always answers like this "that depends" and after getting more details says "oh! That`s something else".
"Ojos de perro azul" is one of my all time favorites!
"The night of the cormorants" is maybe the most hard to get of them all, but still in a realistic manner.
The story of Nabo is really emotional: it is about a young boy that is hit in the head by a horse`s hoof and goes crazy. The family that owns him tie him up for more than 15 years and locks him in a room. The story ends in great style (one of the things I like from Carpentier): a phrase more than a page long.
"Isabel`s monologue" is written in a very mature way, with the writers trademark all over it.
I will definitely re-read some of these stories!
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The stories – heavy on subjective observation – were mostly compelling, a few indeed mesmerizing. Two in particular grabbed my attention.
"The Third Resignation," appearing in a Colombian magazine in 1947 when Marquez Gabriel Garcia Marquez's first collection of short stories, "Eyes of a Blue Dog" or "Ojos de perro azul" from 1947, consists of 11 stories published when Marquez was ages 19-27. I read an English translation by Gregory Rabassa of these stories in a 1984 book "Collected Stories."
The stories – heavy on subjective observation – were mostly compelling, a few indeed mesmerizing. Two in particular grabbed my attention.
"The Third Resignation," appearing in a Colombian magazine in 1947 when Marquez was 19, was his first published story. In effect a discourse on delirium, it was a story that Edgar Allen Poe might have written.
The narrator had suffered a severe case of typhoid fever at age seven and, in the story, is now 25 years old. He has been hovering between death and life for 18 years, lying in a coffin. He says, "He remembered that he had reached adulthood. He was twenty-five years old and that meant he wouldn't grow any more. His features would become firm, serious. But when he was healthy he wouldn't be able to talk about his childhood. He hadn't had any. He had spent it dead."
"Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo" is an excellent story of only nine pages, about unrelenting rain for five days during May in an unnamed village. As someone who has endured hurricanes in Louisiana and multi-day El Niño rainstorms in California during my life, I can appreciate the startling physical and psychological observations of the first-person nameless narrator, a pregnant woman.
Just as the rain begins on a Sunday morning in May as the villagers leave church after Mass, the narrator says, "And the sky was a gray jellyfish substance that flapped its wings a hand away from our heads." The rains go on and on. "It rained all afternoon in a single tone. In the uniform and peaceful intensity you could hear the water fall, the way it is when you travel all afternoon on a train."
Rain pounds down for four days. There are reports that the heavy rain had broken open tombs in the village cemetery and the dead were floating in the cemetery. Overnight between Wednesday and Thursday, the narrator thinks she smells decomposing bodies. "At dawn on Thursday the smells stopped, the sense of distance was lost. The notion of time, upset since the day before, disappeared completely. Then there was no Thursday. What should have been Thursday was a physical, jellylike thing that could have been parted with the hands in order to look into Friday."
The 11 stories are a good introduction to the writing of this Nobel Prize-winning Colombian. I look with pleasure to reading his later short stories in the "Collected Stories" and checking out his novels.
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This one is the Eyes of a blue dog, a collection about death mostly, only three stories aren't about death including the eyes of a blue dog, but it is an amazing story, the borders between dreams and reality, the way things seem in a dream and the whole plot line are incredible, then there is one the best stories, The third resi A great collection of stories, it's amusing how good Marquez is in writing short stories, I think he could easily get a Nobel prize for just his short stories collection.
This one is the Eyes of a blue dog, a collection about death mostly, only three stories aren't about death including the eyes of a blue dog, but it is an amazing story, the borders between dreams and reality, the way things seem in a dream and the whole plot line are incredible, then there is one the best stories, The third resignation, this one with the night of the curlews, and the other side of death are uniquely different views of death, a great narrative, a powerful vision and a great plot.
I was surprised with the quality of Marquez short stories and I will continue to read the rest of them soon.
Thanks Gabo! ...more
Although the author conceived this story with an original plot, the concept of active dreaming is not new. Rather, it is an age-old concept and practice known as lucid dreaming. This this type of dream, the initiate soul travels, participates, and actively controls the state of slumber. One is awake while asleep, consciously controlling the dream.
The potential lovers in this story are not lucid dreaming adepts. While they both have consciousness in their shared dream, they cannot control the out
Although the author conceived this story with an original plot, the concept of active dreaming is not new. Rather, it is an age-old concept and practice known as lucid dreaming. This this type of dream, the initiate soul travels, participates, and actively controls the state of slumber. One is awake while asleep, consciously controlling the dream.
The potential lovers in this story are not lucid dreaming adepts. While they both have consciousness in their shared dream, they cannot control the outcomes. The male sleeper suffers instant amnesia upon awakening, The female dreamer is driven to an insane pursuit of the man she meets in the dream, as she wanders through her city muttering, "eyes of a blue dog.." She scrawls the phrase, graffiti-like, to mark her passage, hoping that one day the male dreamer will see her mark and remember, bringing them closer to consummating their relationship in real time.
The male dreamer receives more mercy from the universe. While he desires the woman during his altered state, all vanishes with sunrise and the sounds of an ordinary morning in his household. The man and woman in this extraodinary repetitive dream cycle are cells, souls in a tapestry of what Jung called "the collective unconscious." Like many magical realists, Márquez uses archetypes and unusual descriptions to make his characters memorable. The wouldbe male lover has "eyes of a blue dog." However who has seen a blue dog? And what might his eyes be like?
Although ripe with sensual detail, the two dreamers enjoy a brooding and steamy courtship, but they do not make love. Neither personage has been schooled in yogic dreaming; that is obvious since they stumble through their almost lucid dream cycle. Both travel to meet each other by instinct, and instinct linked to the collective unconscious. Jung describes this a "....a faraway background, those patterns of the immemorial patterns of the human mind, which we have not acquired but have inherited from the dim of ages past."
This story challenges the reader to question the reality of individual dreams. Might we all be like the man in this story, amnesiac upon awakening, unable to touch remembrance? Rationalists will agree that dreaming is necessary for the health of the mind, yet that only seems to explain a fraction of the dream experience. In this story, Márquez pushes beyond the scientific layer of dreaming, exploring a fractured love affair mediated by a disinterested Morpheus.
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Quote: "No abras esa puerta," dijo. "El corredor esta lleno de sueños difíciles," Y yo le dije: "Como lo sabes?" Y ella me dijo: "Porque hace un momento estuve allí y tuve que regresar cuando descubrí que estaba dormida sobre el corazón."
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This is a great late-night read by none other than King Gabo. In comparison to his previous works, this story falls under the more fantastical side of magic realism. This story doesn't have some of the explicit socioeconomic or cultural themes of his more prominent wo
For starters, I'll say that this story packs a lot more punch in Spanish. The translated version isn't my favorite, but I originally read this in Spanish five years ago and wanted to see if I felt any different about it in English.This is a great late-night read by none other than King Gabo. In comparison to his previous works, this story falls under the more fantastical side of magic realism. This story doesn't have some of the explicit socioeconomic or cultural themes of his more prominent works like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in Times of Cholera. Other short stories he's written, such as The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, are more representative of this careful balance between the magical and real life.
However, I do happen to appreciate this more magical, eerie and cynical take on the subconscious. The book closed with the quote, "You're the only man who doesn't remember anything of what he's dreamed after he wakes up." This reminded me of my own hopelessness with my subconscious mind and my dream-like state. This part of me just vanishes the moment I wake up. That begs the question: What happens to us when we go to sleep — and does it even matter? Sort of like the "if a tree falls in a forest" dilemma.
Another quote that caught my eye: "Little by little we'd been coming to understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings." This was because the characters could wake up by a spoon falling in the kitchen during the early morning. In retrospect, a lot of my relationships have ended that way. It's always the little things. I didn't see it like that in the moment, as if I was in the eye of a storm. However, the filter of time gave me this new introspection. In the story, it was the filter of this dreamy realm or dimension.
I recommend reading this before you go to bed. It'll give you lots to think about. 3/5 stars for me … definitely read in Spanish next time.
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I started with One hundred years of Solitude approximately a year ago - few chapters in, I was completely mesmerized by the language and the style but found it very difficult to keep up with the underlying motifs, and intent.
Although I enjoyed the prose and magic that Gabo builds, I wanted to understand his intent better, and r
(TLDR is if you are someone like me with absolutely no background in literature - but love challenge and also love beautiful, dream-like prose, then this book is for you)I started with One hundred years of Solitude approximately a year ago - few chapters in, I was completely mesmerized by the language and the style but found it very difficult to keep up with the underlying motifs, and intent.
Although I enjoyed the prose and magic that Gabo builds, I wanted to understand his intent better, and reasoned that probably reading his early works will help, and that's how I ended up with Gabo's collection of short stories.
(This actually is part 1 of the book I'm reading - which is "Collected stories" by the same Author and Translator)
In the early few stories, it becomes evident how fascinated Gabo is about death and the life after death - but later the story diversifies to a lot of other things - including one story about someone escaping a murder and building an alibi ("The Woman who came at six o'clock").
I reread each of the stories at least 2 times - mainly because of my attention span and lack of any training in literature, but it was worth this time.
I also ended the re-reading each story by reading about that particular story on the internet - which helped a lot to understand a lot of the secondary intent under those beautiful prose (Example: "Bitterness for three sleepwalkers")
Of the 11 stories in this collection, my absolute favorite would be the second story "The other side of Death".
I absolutely love and am in complete awe of how even a mundane event of someone falling to sleep and waking up from a nightmare is described so beautifully and could capture that dream-like state in words.
They are all difficult t
This book is a collection of fourteen short stories written between 1947 and 1955, and originally published in periodicals. Although not technically juvenilia, since he wrote them in his twenties and recognized them by republishing them in this anthology in 1974, they all date from before his first mature novella, La hojarasca. I think it would be true to say that with one or two exceptions they are of more interest for his development than in their own right as stories.They are all difficult to understand; unlike many modernists who began with more realist or romantic styles, right from the beginning García Márquez was seeking a modernist, non-realistic style influenced by writers such as Kafka and Borges, and he had not yet learned how to do that while remaining comprehensible to others. Nearly all of them are in some way about death; the first story is essencially about a consciousness in a dead body, and others are concerned with ghosts and spirits, influences of the dead on the living, and so forth. The stories from the fifties foreshadow his later technique of "magic realism" and resemble his mature works more than those from the forties. Probably the best is the title story, "Ojos de perro azul" about two people who dream together but never meet in the waking world.
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P.S. Keep an orange next to you. You might (never) want to eat it! Have you ever dreamed of being dead while being alive? Did you feel the humid taste of being buried, yet knowing at the same time that it's just a dream which will soon come true? The very moment you've opened your eyes in the morning everything is new, but just wait until the next night - it will haunt you back with its beauty.
P.S. Keep an orange next to you. You might (never) want to eat it! ...more
Worth it for the tale of a dead man that kept growing and Isabel's account of the rain in Macondo.
This was extremely dark for Gabriel García Márquez. Dark for any author. Convoluted and strange. Plagued with sad, lonely ghosts and time loops.
Worth it for the tale of a dead man that kept growing and Isabel's account of the rain in Macondo.
This was extremely dark for Gabriel García Márquez. Dark for any author. ...more
Chaos is my thing, so I like that. 10/10, would read again. Would still be confused.
He studied at the University of Bogotá and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian
Gabriel José de la Concordia García Márquez was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. García Márquez, familiarly known as "Gabo" in his native country, was considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.He studied at the University of Bogotá and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He wrote many acclaimed non-fiction works and short stories, but is best-known for his novels, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). His works have achieved significant critical acclaim and widespread commercial success, most notably for popularizing a literary style labeled as magical realism, which uses magical elements and events in order to explain real experiences. Some of his works are set in a fictional village called Macondo, and most of them express the theme of solitude.
Having previously written shorter fiction and screenplays, García Márquez sequestered himself away in his Mexico City home for an extended period of time to complete his novel Cien años de soledad, or One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967. The author drew international acclaim for the work, which ultimately sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. García Márquez is credited with helping introduce an array of readers to magical realism, a genre that combines more conventional storytelling forms with vivid, layers of fantasy.
Another one of his novels, El amor en los tiempos del cólera (1985), or Love in the Time of Cholera, drew a large global audience as well. The work was partially based on his parents' courtship and was adapted into a 2007 film starring Javier Bardem. García Márquez wrote seven novels during his life, with additional titles that include El general en su laberinto (1989), or The General in His Labyrinth, and Del amor y otros demonios (1994), or Of Love and Other Demons.
(Arabic: جابرييل جارسيا ماركيز) (Hebrew: גבריאל גארסיה מרקס)
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