INNOCENT ERENDIRA

The title novella and two stories are fairly recent; the rest, nine short pieces, date from the Fifties, when Garcia Marquez had not yet hit the stride of his famous fabulism and was working instead in a very French, very surrealist style, minutely and morbidly conscious of the deteriorating human body. These quivery pieces do, however, have some impact as a group—pointing up G-M's obsession with the child's question: Where do the dead go to? The newer work is far richer. "A Sea of Lost Time," best by far, offers a dazzling speculation. A poor seaside South American town becomes subject to "a compact fragrance that left no chink for any other odor of the past. . . . By dawn the smell was so pure that it was a pity even to breathe it." After an American philanthropist comes to town, bringing first boom then bust, the starving townspeople take to the sea in search of food; they go on heroic and impossibly long underwater swims, during which they encounter all the world's dead, floating peacefully—face up—at different depths. Luscious image clambers over luscious image in this story; it's tapestry-like. The title story is more in the One Hundred Years of Solitude manner—a girl's life-long prostitution and her mythical emancipation—and Garcia Marquez's many fans will love the wild leaps and strange qualities; to us they seemed slightly forced. But the touch is wholly characteristic: blood is "oily. . . shiny and green, like mint honey." A man shoots into clouds with a rifle to get it to rain. Poison comes in a birthday cream pie. Lovesick people can't tolerate bread. Ah. . . .