Month: December 2019

McCarthy’s Bar – Pete McCarthy

On By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

The eight rule of travel states: “Never Pass A Bar That Has Your Name On It”

For someone with roots in the west of Ireland, even though he was born in England, McCarthy spent a lot of time during his childhood in Ireland and was familiar with just how ubiquitous the McCarthy name was in the west and so how many bars there were with his name. As this is being posted on New Years Eve being in a bar is an ideal subject.

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A little background on Pete McCarthy first, he originally made his name as a comedian but where I first came across him was as the presenter of Travelog, a Channel 4 (UK television) quirky travel programme which started in 1990 and then from his numerous appearances on BBC Radio 4 shows both comedy and travel based. Sadly he died of cancer in 2004 aged only 52 and left us just two books to enjoy his gently humorous writing. McCarthy’s Bar was the first and was published in 2000, my copy is the paperback from 2001. The book starts on St Patrick’s Day and “McCarthy’s Bar was heaving”, he goes on to describe not only his own steadily more drunken state but that of the very international clientele of pub and his growing realisation that he really felt Irish, the punchline at the end of the chapter is typically Pete McCarthy.

Outside I stood under the green neon shamrock and looked up at the sign. ‘McCarthy’s’ it said. ‘Hungary’s top Irish pub’.

I turned up my collar. Budapest can still be quite chilly in March.

Sod this I thought. Next year I’ll go to Ireland.

Sadly McCarthy’s in Budapest no longer exists, but it is commemorated by the fact that next year he did go to Ireland and provided this wonderfully funny and also at time deeply thought provoking book as he sees how Ireland has changed since he was there as a child each summer holiday on the family farm, whilst visiting as many bars called McCarthy’s as he could find. There are two trips covered in the book, the first one uses a hire car for a week to set up a much longer trip using a beaten up old Volvo which he buys in England for less than the cost of hiring the original car for the week, cue a very funny passage which deals with the trials, tribulations and surprising hidden costs of hiring a car.

By the trip with the Volvo he has got into his stride with the style of the book and he also has a plan beyond the original premise of just travelling which is to finish with a pilgrimage to St Patrick’s Purgatory a notoriously difficult three days of fasting and prayer on an island in a lake in County Donegal. There is no real explanation as to why he chooses to do this, visiting all the pubs with your name on them makes sense as a plan for a trip round Ireland but as to why he wants to do the three days at the end not even McCarthy seems clear with the reasoning other than he picked up the leaflet about it and decided to go.

Another series of locations soon become obvious in the narrative, McCarthy is fascinated by the multitude of ancient stone circles and other monuments that litter the countryside in Ireland and regular diversions are planned to visit them between evenings (and quite often nights) in the various pubs. He examines the uneven way Ireland has become wealthy from the mid 1990’s with the Celtic Tiger boom and the huge increase in tourism outside of Dublin that has come with it, so there is a lot more to the book than simply funny stories. However there are plenty of those and one of my favourites concerns the town of Bunratty and the castle with the Folk Park. The park includes various buildings created to represent Irish history and a ‘pub’ called Durty Nellies where it turns out that at night the locals go to so as to avoid all the tourists that now fill their traditional bars. Creating the odd situation that the real pubs in town cater for the tourists and the fake pub in the theme park, which is aimed at tourists, is where you will find the actual locals at least after the park is officially closed anyway.

There are several laugh out loud sections and I loved the short passage on his trip to Killarney racecourse which he went to on the advice of his severely out of date guide which was written by William Makepeace Thackeray a hundred and fifty years earlier.

At the end of an astonishing long line of bookies is a chap called McCarthy. I go straight over and put £5 at five to one on a horse whose name closely resembles a TV executive I’d like to see run two and a half miles jumping fences while a fierce little Irish bloke whipped him.

The horse lost, but it’s a good story. That also applies to all the other stories in the book even including the three days on Station Island in Lough Derg where he manages to inject humour into purgatory.

The pub doorway featured on the cover is that of MacCarthy’s Bar in Castletownbere, County Cork owned and run by Adrienne MacCarthy, the ‘a’ drops in and out of spelling Mac quite frequently in both Ireland and Scotland. However the sign was photoshopped for the cover to reflect the spelling of Pete’s surname. The nun by the way is not really in holy orders but one of the barmaids dressed up for the photoshoot. There is a really good write up about the real bar and the effect it had and continues to have on the business in the Irish Times from December 2014.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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This post is going up on Christmas Eve so I thought it would be good to look at one of the Christmas books sent as occasional gifts by Allen Lane (the founder of Penguin Books) and his family. This isn’t a review of one of the greatest works in English literature, rather I want to look at the book itself and how it came into existence.

The Ancient Mariner was the gift in 1945 from Allen and his brother Richard, sadly the third brother John had died during the war, and this was the first one published since 1930. The tradition of an occasional privately printed limited edition book was started by Allen’s uncle, John Lane, who founded his company The Bodley Head in 1887 initially to sell antiquarian books. In 1894 he started publishing in his own right and that year sent a small volume of the autobiography of Sir Thomas Bodley as a Christmas present to family and friends. It is not known how many copies were printed but it is rarely seen so presumably the print run was quite small. I featured this book in my first ever post on this blog.  There were three books printed as gifts from 1928 to 1930, the first was from Allen and Dick Lane, the other two were from Allen, Dick and John Lane and then whilst there was a gap in the production of books, there were some interesting Christmas cards printed instead in some of those years.

As mentioned above John Lane (Allen’s brother as opposed to his uncle of the same name) died during the war so this restart of a tradition came from Allen and Richard (no longer calling himself Dick). The resultant volume bears the mark of being a little hurried, after all it was only a few months after the end of the war and it was presumably also a little celebration that the conflict was over and normal life could start to return. The cover is full dark blue Niger leather with a medallion stamped in gold and looks rather fine (although it does fade quite badly) however the title page in particular is a bit of a mess with five different fonts and type sizes used in just seven lines.

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After that unprepossessing start though the presentation of the poem itself is rather lovely, the paper is hand made with a gilded top edge, the illustrations by Duncan Grant are also quite atmospheric and whilst better than the original attempts which were rejected by the artist were apparently not as good as they might have been.

Duncan Grant was not happy with the first illustrations we produced, so we did them again, adding I think two more colours

Richard Lane

Quite what they would have looked like without the extension of the colour palette I can’t imagine as they are fairly restricted in colours used even as ultimately printed. Hans Schmoller, Head of Typography and Design at Penguin Books from 1949 to 1976, also felt that they were not as good as they might have been, although for a different reason.

I’ve always thought it a pity that Duncan Grant’s beautiful coloured drawings were reproduced photo-lithographically instead of as auto-lithographs.

Auto-lithography is definitely a far superior process and one that Penguin already used very successfully to give far more subtle colour grading and is also under control of the artist so would presumably avoided Grant’s original problem with the first version of the prints. Maybe it wasn’t done because of this extra work that the artist has to do, but anyway the illustrations are good but as Schmoller says, could have been better.

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As can be seen above the actual text is very pleasingly done with the main part of the poem being in black whilst the commentary on the action is in Venetian red. There is also a lot of blank space round the text which makes it easier to read, this is especially noticeable after the cramped styling forced on publishers during the war when the need to conserve paper stocks led to small fonts and words as close to the paper edge as possible. Richard Lane again:

During the war the production of our publications was only moderate – very narrow margins and as many words to the page as we possibly could fit in – so in The Ancient Mariner we went to town on production

I like the book a lot, it is one of the more difficult Lane Christmas books to find as it appeals not only to collectors of these works but Duncan Grant is also very collectable and there were only 700 copies produced. This is a lot compared to the other Christmas books right up until 1950 when the first one with a print run of 1000 appeared but this does appear to be quite elusive, so was one of the last I have managed to acquire for my collection. I leave you with the image of the first appearance of the albatross that would cause so many problems for the Mariner and wish my readers a very Happy Christmas.

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Penguin Science Survey

On By bookramblings142In Sets and Series2 Comments

I recently completed my collection of this interesting series, some of which are surprisingly difficult to find, so I thought it was time to review the fifteen books that make the set and the history of how they came to exist. Although they were all published in the 1960’s their genesis was back in the 1940’s with two ‘quarterly’ periodicals also published by Penguin; Science News which ran to fifty four volumes from June 1946 to March 1960 and New Biology which had thirty one volumes from July 1945 to January 1960. As you can see from the date ranges, although these were theoretically quarterly, in practice only Science News managed anything like a volume every three months, in fact there was a gap of nineteen months between New Biology 1 and volume 2. These books each contained various articles covering a wide range of scientific advances written by scientists at a level where the interested layman wouldn’t feel intimidated but detailed enough to be of interest to the scientific community. By 1960 though Penguin Books were getting out of the periodicals business, however there was still seen to be a need for something like Science News and New Biology so Penguin Science Survey was born the following year.

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1961 The Specials

Science News and New Biology had their own series codes within Penguin Books but as those had come to an end a new home was needed. The logical place was within the Pelican imprint which was well established as the main factual part of Penguin Books output and the 1961 volumes were therefore planned to go there. Both books have the Pelican logo internally and volume 1 even has a number in the Pelican range A526 (which was re-assigned to The Living Brain by W. Grey Walter published August 1961) but for some reason very late in the day it was decided they should be Penguin Specials and came out as S193 and S194 in June 1961 in what looks like a hasty rebinding with laminated thin card covers unlike anything else from Penguin at the time.

Volume 1 replaced Science News and covers such diverse subjects as elementary particles, The US space plan, geophysics, the development of nuclear weapons and several other topics. Each article is around twenty pages long and there are a dozen in total along with a preface by the editor Arthur Garrett and a section on units and constants. Volume 2 is the equivalent of New Biology and has fifteen articles ranging from smoking and cancer of the lung (an article well ahead of its time), world food production, the life of viruses, the cockroach, the brain of the octopus, etc. again these are normally around twenty pages long each and there is also a preface by the joint editors S.A. Barnett and Anne McLaren. Both volumes also have numerous line drawings within the text and a section of black and white photographic plates in the middle of the book. Having created this template in these volumes it was largely stuck to for the following years.

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1963 A new home

There were no editions in 1962 and when they re-appeared in February 1963 they were oddly assigned to be part of the ‘main series’ with catalogue numbers 1924 and 1925 where they shared space with novels, travelogues, biographies and plays, they had also become A and B rather than 1 and 2 although A continued to be the equivalent of Science News with B covering New Biology with the same editors as in 1961. Volume A has amongst its eleven main essays a good article on optical astronomy by Patrick Moore and a fascinating piece on computers subtitled a progress review where the author describes an amazing IBM machine that could store a massive 100 million characters; which is several orders of magnitude less than an average mobile phone today. Roughly half of volume B is taken up with a series of articles linked under the heading ‘Matters of Life and Death’ which cover chromosomes, contraception, malformations and family planning. Also included in the rest of the book is a piece on tissue transplantation which was still in its early days, along with eight other essays.

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1964 and 1965 A short period of stability

These two years continued the pattern of 1963 with the same editors and a wide spread of subjects covered. The books are still in the ‘main series’, which is where they would remain, and are assigned the following catalogue numbers 2043 and 2044 (April 1964) along with 2225 and 2226 (April 1965).

In 1964 subjects included elementary particles, Soviet space research, adhesion and a quirky short article entitled ‘How discoveries are made: a plea for intuition’ all in volume A, whilst volume B has life on other planets, the origin of man, learning a birds language, communication in bees amongst many other essays. In 1965 part A is split into three sections: Physical Research including superconductivity (still very relevant today), the physics of the brain, and automated spacecraft of the US. The second section is entitled Industrial Applications of Science and has diverse subjects such as Diamonds in industry, rubber, and supersonic aircraft. The final part is entitled Communications and has just two articles, the communication of information, and science on radio. Part B bounces all over the place from mental images, athletic physique, homosexuality, tranquillisers, and the yeasts of wine to other subjects equally intriguing.

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1966 A missing book and a new title

Any collector looking for Penguin Science Survey A from 1966 will search in vain because it was never published. B did come out in March as number 2467 and it was joined, the same month, by Penguin Technology Survey 1966 (number 2439) which covered some of the same ground as Survey A would have been expected to do, it is also edited by the regular Survey A editor Arthur Garrett. This book is probably the one that interests me most with essays on the impact of electrical engineering, new methods of printing, computer aided design (remember this is 1966 so really surprising to see what feels like a new technology in use over fifty years ago) and a look forward to nuclear fusion reactors (which is still the case) along with other subjects. Science Survey B has a new editor, Anthony Allison, but apart from that little has changed. Like Technology Survey the subjects feel up to date including the challenge of insecticide resistance, two articles on fighting virus infections by differing means, and several more on the effects of temperature in biology and medicine.

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1967 And then there was three

Any thoughts that the 1966 Penguin Technology Survey was a re-branding of Survey A which wasn’t done very well and left Survey B stranded was dispelled this year by the existence of three titles 2640 Penguin Technology Survey 1967 (April), 2687 Penguin Science Survey 1967 Biology (July) and 2688 Penguin Science Survey 1967 Physical Sciences (also July). The renaming of the surveys was presumably to make it more obvious what they covered rather than A or B and the same editors continued from the previous year along with Nicholas Valéry who took over what used to be Survey A and was now Physical Sciences.

Technology Survey has a good article on technological advances in Japan, something we would all become familiar with over the following decades and there are also a couple of excellent essays on technology in medicine but my favourite has to be the last one which deals with the problems of naming things as technology advances and is entitled “Let’s make up the words as we go along”. The Biology Survey is subtitled The Biology of Sex and all fifteen essays are concerned with some aspect of this subject including four on sex in the insect world, a couple on mammals in general and others including anthropology, and the x-chromosome. With technology now in its own volume what was Survey A is more restricted in its subject matter but this means it can look deeper into specific areas, instead of one article on space science which was the most you got up until now there are three, this better reflects the 1960’s Space Age fascination. There are also pieces on solar energy, detecting underground nuclear explosions (also a hot topic at the time) and high energy physics.

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1968 The last hurrah

Technology Survey only lasted for two volumes and was gone after 1967. 1968 would be the final year of the Penguin Science Survey. 2840 Penguin Science Survey 1968 Biology and 2841 Penguin Science Survey 1968 Physical Sciences finally hit the bookshelves in November and had the same editors as in 1967. As with the previous year the Biology volume took one overarching subject, in this case photobiology, and the twelve papers look at all aspects of the effect of light in biology. From photochemisty, through photosynthesis, to the impact of light in controlling flowers, and on to bioluminescence with plants and animals producing their own light there is lots to get into in this book. Finally comes Physical Sciences, there are ten articles in this volume and several of these are still major paths of investigation today such as the worlds weather, superconductors, controlled nuclear fusion, and life in the universe.

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The other Surveys

Somebody at Penguin obviously thought that the Science Surveys were a good idea and decided to expand the concept because in April 1965 there appeared 2336 Penguin Survey of Business and Industry 1965 alongside 2337 Penguin Survey of the Social Sciences 1965. For the purposes of this article we can ignore the business book, as it doesn’t include the word Science in the title, other than to note that three more volumes were produced. Number 2528 in June 1966 was for 1966, number 2746 in July 1967 was for 1967 and oddly number 2882 in October 1968 was apparently for 1967-8. With four volumes the business series was considerably more successful than its fellow which proudly proclaimed on its back cover that it is “The first in a new series of annual surveys” but the Social Science ‘series’ in the end only had two volumes with the next, and final, edition being 2823 Penguin Social Sciences Survey 1968 coming out in October 1968 just in time for the whole Survey concept to be killed off.

Now I would be the first to say that I know little about the social sciences but some of the articles do look to be potentially quite interesting. In 1965 the book starts with ‘In Defence of Sociology’ which I feel is John Gould’s (the editor of both books) attempt to get his response as to why the book was produced in before anyone asked the question. But Trends and problems in Soviet studies sounds like a paper that could be written now and How small-scale societies change turns out to be quite a good study in social anthropology. I must admit however that Prolegomena to the study of British kinship had me reaching for a dictionary, it apparently means a preface so why not say so? Reading the article, or at least starting it,  confirms my initial opinion that the author was simply trying to show off, as the word choices are often unreasonably complex and make it virtually unreadable. The 1968 book does also have several very good papers, on the power of politics, armed forces and the political process, and the study of organisations being three that particularly drew my attention.

Conclusion

All properly written articles on science should finish with a summary of what we have learned and in this case I just want to stress how good these books are. As you can see from the selection of article titles I have picked out they are to some extent still relevant today and provide an interesting background to the development of modern science and technology. Apart from the 1963 volumes and 1965’s Social Sciences (by Josef Albers) the covers were all designed by F.H.K. Henrion which gives a pleasing consistency to the series, no designer is credited for the 1963 effort or 1967’s Technology Survey but that one at least also looks like his work.

The price more than doubled over the eight years from six shillings (30p) in 1961 to twelve shillings and sixpence (62½p) in 1968 and they were always considerably more expensive than other Penguin books at the time which probably helped with their demise. In 1968 a novel the same length as one of the surveys would have cost five shillings (25p) so less than half the price, the reason is probably down to the lower print runs for specialised titles so fewer being sold but equally the price must have put off a significant number of potential readers therefore contributing to the downward spiral of purchasers.

Search them out, they are worth looking for and when you do find them still only cost a few pounds.

Misericords – Philip Sharpe and Andrew Judd

On By bookramblings142In Reviews1 Comment

This lovely book wasn’t planned to be a post on this blog because until the 23rd November this year I didn’t even know it existed. On that day I was in Hay on Wye, which is the worlds first book town, and discovered a new shop that I hadn’t seen before. Balch and Balch (also trading as The Story of Books) specialise in books from Private Presses and although the main room was closed at the time as they were preparing for the Winter Festival to be held the following weekend Graeme kindly brought a selection of about eight titles for me to have a look at, top of the pile was this one. Now he couldn’t have known that I have a lifetime fascination with misericords and if ever I am in a medieval church or cathedral always check to see what delights are hidden away there in the choir stalls.

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So before reviewing the book, just what are misericords? The description as given at the start of the King Penguin book on the subject (written by M.D. Anderson and published in October 1954 as K72) is reproduced below.

An intelligent sightseer who wishes to understand the mentality of ordinary people living in the Middle Ages will find a rich reward for even a superficial study of the carvings on Gothic choir stalls, particularly those of misericords. The medieval priests, finding the physical strain of standing through a succession of long services beyond their endurance, devised a hinged seat with a corbel projecting from its under-surface which, when the seat was tipped up, allowed them to combine the comfort of sitting with the appearance of standing. In an age which was lavish in the use of fine craftsmanship it was natural that these corbels, although seldom seen, should be decorated with carvings and the work gave a rare opportunity for self-expression to carvers employed.

As implied there is a wide variety of subjects to be seen on misericords and a lot of the time you wonder what they are doing in a church, real and imaginary animals, people making beer or wine (and drinking it), various domestic scenes, knights in armour or even in New College Oxford a series depicting the seven deadly sins… What is rarely depicted is religious subjects. these carvings after all were intended to be sat on and it was not seen as suitable to have sacred images for that purpose. This brings us to the carvings in St Mary’s church at Ripple in Worcestershire, England which were used to inspire the illustrations in this book. Of the sixteen misericords in the church twelve depict ‘the labours of the months’ and Andrew Judd has produced some lovely linocuts of these to accompany not only a medieval poem but also twelve new works by Philip Sharpe that fill out the story.

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The book is printed in a limited edition of just 50 copies of which mine is number 45 by a private press called MKB Editions about whom I have unfortunately been able to find out very little other than it appears to be a Hereford based collaboration between Sharpe and Judd as everything I can find published by the press involves one or both of them. Of the 49 other copies of this book, two are held in libraries according to worldcat, at the University of Oxford and also, somewhat more randomly, the University of Arizona.

It really is a beautiful book, printed by letterpress on Zerkall paper it is quarter cloth bound with printed boards forming the cover. In total there are fourteen prints, one for each of the months along with one facing the anonymous medieval poem that formed part of the inspiration to the book and a further image making up the final page; all are based on the misericords in St. Mary’s. I admit to buying it for the prints rather than the poetry by Philip Sharpe which is OK but without the images I would not have looked twice at the book. There are several references to the River Severn (which flows roughly 100 yards from my front door) and also its propensity to flood, which living here I am all too aware of, so the verses ring true to my locality. But sadly other than the geographic recognition I don’t have a deep feeling for the text; but I will treasure the book nevertheless for adding to my love of the remarkable misericord and a chance discovery decades ago in childhood that has led to a fascination with old churches that I still retain today.

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Strange Pilgrims – Gabriel García Márquez

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For my 100th post on this blog I have chosen one of the lesser known works by Gabriel García Márquez, in fact it is his last published collection of short stories. They were started during the 1970’s and 80’s but were not actually published until 1992 with an English translation appearing a year later. My copy is the Penguin books edition translated by Edith Grossman and published in 1994 with a bizarre cover by Matthew Richardson of Eastwing Design. The twelve tales are linked by being all about Latin American characters travelling or living in Europe, this was a familiar position for Márquez at the time as he lived in Barcelona for seven years in the 1970’s, going there after the success of his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude”.

Born in Columbia, Márquez spent a lot of his life in Mexico, although his time in Europe clearly had a significant influence on these works. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 he is probably best known for his novels, three of which are also on my shelves along with three more books of short stories. However because there are so many reviews of his novels such as “Love in the Time of Cholera”and “One Hundred Years of Solitude”  and also as I have a soft spot for well crafted short stories this collection had to be the one to read this week.

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In the preface Márquez explains the long gestation of these stories, beginning with an exercise book in which he wrote sixty four tales none of which he was quite happy with, the dates each story was started is given after each one in the book and I have added this information as a date in brackets after each title below. He had several goes at rewriting but was never satisfied and the book was added to his papers to be looked at again when he might have a better idea how to work with the material. Unfortunately the exercise book got lost, presumably thrown out by accident, so he had a go at recreating them from memory. This reduced the total to about thirty and he is sanguine about this regarding the other half as clearly not good enough if he couldn’t remember how they went. The stories were still not right though and it was not until a final eight months of solid work finished the last ten included in this collection, which were all worked on simultaneously, that he finally had a book that he was happy to publish in the early 1990’s.

The twelve stories are each briefly reviewed below:-

Bon Voyage, Mr President (June 1979)

The first story concerns a familiar subject for Latin America, that of a deposed and exiled president finding treatment for illness in a foreign country, in this case Geneva in Switzerland. He is recognised by one of the ambulance drivers who comes from his original country and the driver plans along with his wife to get money from him by selling a fake insurance and funeral plan. The plot does not go as they intended and the development of the three characters makes an interesting twist.

The Saint (August 1981)

The Saint in the story is the incorruptible body of a seven year old girl from Columbia being taken round Rome by her father in an attempt to have her recognised as a saint. Well that is the initial premise anyway. In truth the story is more about the various characters staying in the hostel near the Vatican and their inter-reactions not only with each other, the saint and oddly the lion in the nearby zoo. The final two sentences of the tale though switch the meaning of the title in an unexpected way.

Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane (June 1982)

I’m not sure what to make of this story, it has a distinct voyeuristic tone that can be a little uncomfortable. The narrator sees a beautiful woman in Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris and then is pleased to see that he has the seat next to her on the plane to New York. The descriptions of watching her sleep next to him throughout the flight without any communication taking part between them throughout the journey makes odd reading.

I Sell My Dreams (March 1980)

Another tale regarding sleep, although this time the prophetic dreams of a Colombian woman who had come to Europe as a child and is first encountered by Márquez in Vienna. He sees her again many years later in Barcelona when he meets the Chilean poet Pablo Naruda and she is in the same restaurant and she is still making money from her dreams.

“I Only Came to Use the Phone” (April 1978)

The most disturbing story in the collection. A woman is driving on the way to Barcelona in a storm when her car breaks down. She is eventually picked up by a bus which drops her off at its destination so that she can use the phone. However the rest of the passengers are female mental patients and it is assumed at the asylum that she must also be a patient and she is prevented from calling her husband, sedated and admitted. The story describes her ultimate mental collapse as she tries and fails to explain her true situation.

The Ghosts of August (October 1980)

At less than four full pages this is the shortest work in the collection and is a really good ghost story, this time set in Tuscany and again involving a real person, in this case Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva.

María dos Prazeres (May 1979)

Maria is a semi-retired prostitute in her seventies, originally from Manaus in Brazil but living for most of her life in the Gracia district of Barcelona. She now has only one client who has come to her weekly for decades and it is more a relationship than a business proposition. Convinced she is soon to die the story concerns her elaborate plans for her funeral and what is to happen with her belongings including her little dog afterwards. You really get to know her as the story unfolds and just as with other stories in this collection things suddenly change at the end.

Seventeen Poisoned Englishmen (April 1980)

The eponymous Englishmen are simply bit players in this tale of a Colombian widow who has travelled to Italy planning to see the Pope soon after the end of WWII. What it is more about is her reactions to post war Naples and her fears when she has to make her own way rather than the planned help she was expecting.

Tramontana (January 1982)

The Tramontana of the title is a persistent and powerful wind that the narrator of the tale experienced for three long days whilst staying in Cadaqués in Catalonia. He describes it as oppressive presence taking a personal affront to the presence of him and his family. It also clearly has a strong effect on all those who experience it.

Miss Forbes’s Summer of Happiness (1976)

Two young boys from Alta Guajira on the Colombian Caribbean coast are on the island of Pantelleria at the southern end of Sicily for a long summer holiday. For the first month they were with their parents and all was wonderful but they had left them in the care of a German governess called Miss Forbes whilst they went on a writers retreat elsewhere in the Mediterranean. She is very strict and the holiday had become intolerable to the boys, so much so that they resolve to kill her but the plot does not go as they intended…

Light is Like Water (December 1978)

This very short tale (around five pages) is positively surreal and again features two young boys around the ages that Márquez’s children would have been when he started to write it. As the narrator explains, he was asked how the light came on at a touch of the switch and replied “Light is like water, you turn the tap and out it comes”. Taking this seriously the boys break a bulb and sail a boat on the pool of light that cascades out of it despite being in an apartment on the fifth floor of a building in Madrid. But you should never play with liquid light.

The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow (1976)

Like the boys in ‘Light is Like Water’ the protagonists of this final tale are originally from Cartegena de Indias on the Colombian Caribbean coast but this time they are wealthy young adults recently married and travelling from Madrid to Paris overnight in a Bentley convertible that had been a wedding present. But Nena has cut her finger on a rose thorn and the bleeding will not stop.

A very enjoyable collection and if you have never read any Márquez it’s a good place to start. The stories do all feel that they belong together, possibly due to the simultaneous final rewriting yet are sufficiently different to highlight alternate aspects of his style. Highly recommended.