SOURCE: Bayley, John. “Singing in the Rain.” New York Review of Books 41, no. 4 (17 February 1994): 19-21.

In the following review, Bayley explores the major thematic concerns of the stories in Strange Pilgrims.

Films can more easily be truly international than modern novels. A film's appeal is less parochial, more immediate, more comprehensive. Publishers are shy of translating and trying to sell the latest fictional masterpiece from Portugal or Turkey or Bulgaria: they know all too well how limited its appeal will be, and how limited a grasp of its real virtues will be achieved by the most sympathetically disposed reader. Even Mark Kharitenov, the first winner of the Russian Booker Prize, and an accomplished novelist in the classic Russian tradition, has still to see an English version of his work.

But Latin America has been somehow different. The local characteristics, which so often inhibit the success of a novel...