Reader Response of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” are good but strange. Marquez writes about a dead man being played with by children as if it is an everyday occurrence. Maybe he is talking about it so casually because children often do not understand the finality of death. They might have just thought of this washed up dead man as a giant doll to play with. “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” was written for Playboy magazine and the line in the story “Not only was he the tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen, but even though they were looking at him there was no room for him in their imagination” makes it clear that he is talking about or perhaps comparing the dead man to the beautiful women that grace Playboy’s pages. The women in Playboy are supposed to be the most beautiful, perfect women you will ever see or could ever imagine. Marquez just happens to use a weird example to compare the two.

                The first time I read “The Handsomest Drowned Man In The World” I thought that the people in the story had offbeat ways of grieving. For some reason I immediately thought of a book I just read by Joan Didion titled The Year of Magical Thinking, where she chronicled the grief she had in the year after her husband died. She mentions that she could not throw away her husband’s shoes because he would need them if he came back. That of course would never happen but people grieve in different ways and the women making him clothing so he could go through dignity might have been a way for grief to be expressed or perhaps it was just to be like the people in ancient Egypt who were buried in pyramids and got all of the wonderful worldly possessions to help them in the afterlife. There is no wrong way to grieve so I see my original assessment of their grief being offbeat to be invalid. These people might have been celebrating his life instead of focusing on his death. Their grieving may have been different than how I grieve but not weird in general.

                “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” was a harder story for me to connect with. It reminded me of a circus act or something similar. A woman changing into a spider and paying admission prices to see her is not something that is in a normal story but magical realism is not normal. I have to also wonder if it is supposed to be reminiscent of a freak show because the miracles that the angel performed were not the typical kind that one would think of. The most disturbing one was the leper with sores sprouting sunflowers. The actual thought of that makes me cringe. The descriptions in this story are so vivid that it makes it seem like they could be real. For example the sunflower sprouting sores and the whistling in the heart of the angel. Hearts do not whistle but this story makes it seem as though they can. That is magical! This story also uses a good example that angels can come in many forms. Oftentimes I feel that people still think they know what an angel looks like. But an angel could be ugly, an animal, or just a person you might encounter in everyday life. The show Touched By An Angel was kind of like this. The angels just appeared whenever a person needed them but the only way one could know they were angel was by a glow of light around them. They just looked like normal people. Marquez makes this story an example that an angel could be a horribly ugly creature yet still be divine.

                Both of these stories are longwinded and at times exhausting to read. They almost require a second reading to fully grasp what is going on and to get all of the minute details down. Even after combing through both of these stories I am still not entirely sure I understand it all completely. My favorite was “The Most Beautiful Drowned Man In The World”. I just found it interesting how he makes it seem as if all of these people deal with finding drowned men on a regular basis and how this one in particular was so much better looking. Some people are more beautiful in life than others but I have a hard time imagining a beautiful dead person which is mostly because I do not like looking at the dead and prefer to remember people when they were alive. I think it is morbid to compare these dead drowned people and call some more beautiful. Maybe this drowned man had less time to decompose but there are other factors with that and I will stop before it gets disgusting. I really, thoroughly enjoyed both of these stories because they were just so out there but believable in their own way.