SOURCE: Theroux, Alexander. Review of Strange Pilgrims, by Gabriel García Márquez. Review of Contemporary Fiction 14, no. 1 (spring 1994): 211.

In the following review, Theroux praises the stories in Strange Pilgrims, calling the work “a rich and wonderful collection.”

These twelve tales [in Strange Pilgrims] set in contemporary Europe, written over the last eighteen years (and rewritten, Márquez tells us in a prologue, in “eight feverish months”) deal with an often brave but hapless variety of Latin Americans, all either visiting or living abroad—Geneva, Rome, Barcelona, Paris, Naples, etc.—who for the most part are unprepared in whatever environment to live safely or well. They are comic eccentrics, mostly, obsessives and oddballs. A woman makes a living by telling her dreams. An old prostitute is waiting for death. A beautiful Caribbean boy is driven mad in Spain. A widow dressed in the habit of Saint Francis...