Dialogue with the mirror
With a slow but firm sense of style, this work little as it is exposes an awakening of a man in front of a mirror. As he shaves, a recollection of a shop he frequently passes that house a range of commodities. He bears a frenzied inner monologue as he executes his every morning activities. He has to shave, take a bath, and devour his breakfast activities of which he stumbles through due to the little time that he has. The Nobel Prize winner proceeds to haunt the reader with calculated suspense and takes them down to a land of endless possibilities.
The sea of lost time
With a characteristic change of tact, style, and approach the story sets the stage in a coastal village. Owing to the recent change in weather patterns the usually unattractive village that suffered endless tons of garbage brought along by the indecent winter seas can now boast the smell of fresh roses and glare at their endless glamour in March. Clotide knows not the smell of roses and has little to tell as compared to his husband Tobias who will not stop to acknowledge this rare scene.
Time and again the waters steal the fishermen’s fortune and send them home at dawn with empty nets and garbage and using dynamite bore even worse results of old shipwrecks. It is common for the tides to sweep dead fish to the streets a site not too pleasant to see.
The village allows itself to be influenced by the whole new smell and fragrance the symbolic center stage for colonial misdeeds. With a courteous but necessary marriage between repetition and symbolism, Marquez creates a hunger for answers which he sustains and divorces at the end of the story.
Nabo-The black man who made the angles wait
Conceived in his early times of writing and influenced by the hype of the 1950’s Garcia Marquez tells a story of a black man (Nabo) whose job was to attend to the horses. He ended up having his head kicked by a horse and ends up becoming a retard and an idiot of a child. The pace is set with his face down in the food after spending several nights. The vivid recollection he has is of little help in establishing exactly when and where he is. He has the vivid memory of visiting the square where he would listen to a band on Saturday nights. He recalls that the saxophone player wore horn-rimmed glasses and nothing more.
Realism
Along the stream of maze with the endless wind, this narrative may form the best in so far as depictions of day-to-day life are concerned. Gabriel Garcia Marquez nurses the inevitable suggestion of little or no realism in this telltale by ensuring that he uses the common everyday phenomenon that every reader can relate to. In effect, it would be hard to deny him the pleasure of realism even though in varying degrees in the three stories which contrary to popular ideas shows why he was granted one of the world’s most esteemed prizes.
In the story “The Sea of lost time” Marquez accommodates the reader into the town and makes them comfortable observers of the ambiguous and passionate life of the village. He takes a tour through individuals’ lives of the participants and gives the reader enough time to settle and associate if not relate to them. A recreational reader would inadvertently dismiss a claim of realism in this tale but that would be an underscore of the true objective here. The objectives of realism are clear, to present reality faithfully and objectively without any measure of neither dramatization nor romance. Well, this tour de force does just that in its path towards establishing a link to the woes that became of Latin America and acts of God or nature.
“The Black Man Who Made the Angels Wait” is an even more contextual tale from the realism stand. It brings to life the old traditions of the early 50s and faithfully acknowledges the ways and modes of thinking of the time. It is not deniable that Marquez in these three stories does as little as bend to realism as a topic.
Naturalism
From the gentleness and rage of the sea down to the sea show of an isolated island going up to the reserve of the farms and the horses to the hue a buzz of town live the three stories do more than just reach out to everyday life. Loyal to the objects of the naturalism of acknowledging the inevitable influential environmental social and hereditary concerns of life and society he has created the world of telltale about the real world and the world as we know it.
His idea of naturalism as the world as it ought to be has been manifested to the reads in precise but satisfactory detail in the stories of Nabo and Tobias alike. Like other writers, he shares an approach to naturalism as an exposition of the nakedness of the aspects of life even though unpleasant at times. He is however careful to execute this in a courteous and yet remarkably humorous way.
Naturalism speaks for its self when the fragrance of the roses fills the air in the isolated island bringing new life amidst the inadvertent misgivings of colonial regimes. With the aid of the various characters in the stories the author materializes his claim to a naturalistic view and with a calculated rendition gracefully rests his story.
Magical realism
The three stories were written when magical realism was still in its conceptual stages yet the author did more than propose his understanding of it. In a strict sense, it was a brilliant attempt at bringing to birth a whole new concept unknown to many. He wrote at a time when it sought to be divorced from mythology.
The object of magical realism is to integrate and blend magical elements into constructive reality to offer a deeper and innate understanding of reality. It crosses the perception of the mythology of too strange to be true and presents a stage of too strange to believe. The author does this with a sharpened awareness of style taking care not to injure the readers who want to believe.
He presents a dual dimension character in the story of “The black man who made the angels wait” and pursues that line of thought down to the end taking keen and calculated steps. He lets the reader recreate the events of Nabo’s misfortune as if it happened. He provokes the reader’s fantasy and makes them comfortable at the thought of such false truth.
Double
What makes these stories outstanding is the author’s passionate dedication to a clear conscience in the way the story is told. With a journalistic background, he bears the talent of remarkable news maker which is an everyday affair as well as what every reader wants. He attempts to embrace the modernist ideas and problems by choosing to characterize and place the center of his story on a common man.
In a unique yet relatively familiar tone and approach, he tells you what he is thinking. He talks to the reader and converses with their intellect and makes the bond a mutual one carefully teasing but keeping a distance.