raises hand
The whole end of the story just glows.
carrie
i have no clue what you are talking about and am too lazy to do an internet search.
A short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in which a drowned man washes up on the beach of a small island. His body is found by children of a nearby village, where he is taken and prepared for burial. As he is cleaned, the villagers discover he is of enormous size, and the women fantasize about what kind of man he must have been. They decide he must have been a gentle giant, ashamed of his own size. They eventually release his body out into the sea, but his landing there has such an impact on the villagers that they are never the same again. This is an excellent story, and it is a great example of magical realism.
Found it online and I’m reading it now…
me too…finished…hand up
Thanks!
As he is cleaned, the villagers discover he is of enormous size, and the women fantasize about what kind of man he must have been. They decide he must have been a gentle giant, ashamed of his own size.
Hmmm…
I bet.
(sorry… its been a long week)
Very nice story. Thanks for introducing me to it. The version I found din’t give the author’s name. Glad to get that!
Marquez is a favourite of mine. I haven’t read this story yet.
Autumn of the Patriarch is a great novel.
Such a beautiful story, thanks, I enjoyed it and nice way to start my day… (hugs)
M 
Does anyone know what the reference to “Esteban” is? I recognize the reference to “Sir Walter Raleigh.” Was Esteban some sort of contemporary?
djm
So glad to share the story and its pleasures with all of you!
djm, I wondered about Esteban too. The only vaguely related Esteban I could think of was “Esteban the Moor” who was among the Spanish explorers of the SW US, looking for the lost cities of gold. But that seems too geographically distant to be meaningful. I’m thinking it might just have been chosen because of its meaning. It’s the Spanish form of Steven, which means crown or wreath. That makes sense, I think.
I don’t know if this relates, but St. Stephen was a martyr…??? He gave a long speech that took up all of Acts ch 7, criticizing the people, and got everyone so mad that they stoned him to death. As he was dieing he said “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”. So, St. Stephen represents a noble person who causes people to become aware of their faults??
Carrie, I have such a hard time w/ Gabriel Garcia Marquez! I read 100 Yrs of Solitude and found it upsetting because I could never tell when he was holding people up as admirable, or ridiculing them. The same thing in this story. Did he think it was good that these townsfolk were so moved by the stranger who came to them? Or is he making fun of them for inventing a personality for this unknown guy? “Look how stupid they were, their lives were changed because of some illusion that came out of their own heads”.
I suppose if it had happened in my town, I would have been right there bringing flowers. So maybe GGMarquez is making fun of me too 
and I guess that’s OK 
What’s your take on it???
For me it goes beyond admiration or ridicule, as both elements are squarely there. “Humanly sublime” comes to mind. I think you have to love, with eyes open, the human condition to write like that. I didn’t get a sense of bitterness out of the translation, anyway.
I enjoyed the story very much indeed. I loved this part: “…and the captain would have to come down from the bridge in his dress uniform, with his astrolabe, his pole star, and his row of war medals and, pointing to the promontory of roses on the horizon, he would say in fourteen languages, look there…” 
I had a subtle sense throughout of all the living characters having stars in their eyes, as it were. Even the gross, dirty work of dragging a dead body seemed somehow miraculous, despite, or maybe because of, the simple way it was presented.
I didn’t feel any sense of ridicule. I ended up feeling what the villagers felt: overwhelming love for this kind giant; appreciation for the innate goodness that gave him the power to win over skeptics. It’s how I felt when I read Stephen Mitchell’s translation of The Gospel According to Jesus. That these qualities arose from the imagination of the women does not diminish them for me, not at all.
I loved that too and was very moved.
Yeah, and the children “playing” with it, not frightened or “grossed out”–all so simple.
I really ended up glowing as I read this; and I’m so grateful for that. I can’t even think of the ending without tears welling up!
This is the first work by Garcia Marquez that I have read, so I can’t really comment beyond this one, but I am highly motivated to read more!
I think it is both sides of the same coin, well illustrated in the tales. If you look at just about anything, especially actions compared with motives, you will find that there is a lot of back and forth, and adjustment as people either learn or shut off, or otherwise find a way to deal with the occurances in their lives… they move from one frame of reference to the next, sometimes noticing it themselves, sometimes oblivious to the greater picture.
In Marquez’s writing, one is never quite sure what is fantasy and what real. I think it is a big part of his point that, in Latin America, the two blend to such an extent that nobody is quite sure where one ends and the other begins. Fantastic things really do happen. But some things believed to happen were only imagined. If he isn’t quite sure which is which, how can he tell you?
I read it about a lot of years ago, and I remember loving it. I don’t remember why I loved it, though. I should read it again.
I guess for me any aspect of possible ridicule, if that’s the word, arises - so carefully, to be sure, like a gentle ribbing - in how the characters are made to make much of some things, or in how a sea-captain, mindful of his place in the world, spares nothing for regalia’s sake, and futhermore declaims “in fourteen languages”. But this is what reminds me of the inescapable humanness of the characters who are simply trying to live as best as they know how. And still, what could be interpreted as the captain’s vain peacockery can also be seen as no more than the right and proper outer formal trappings of respect and the sense of occasion that goes with it; after all, whatever the catalyst, a whole community was transformed from the desert to the garden. The captain provides a semiotic compression that I like.
The story was very much as if told by, or for, a child. Which I mean in a good way.
It sounds like all women’s phantasy of the ideal man. They only very reluctantly let him go again, and let him go only by assuring that he may come back again, and not been sunk into the depth of the ocean. They even change their doors and plant flowers to attract the man of their phantasy in future. The men are sent out to the neighbouring villages to find out if anyone is missing, and the women are so relieved to hear that no one is missing, and that they can claim this man for themselves. The women fail to celebrate their own men and seem to just use them. Why is that so I wonder? Is it because they are stuck on a tiny island, with not enough soil, and the constant fear that their children will fly away? How can a man ever fullfill such a phantasy?
It seems the children have the best attitude: they bury and dig up the man in their play. They are not attached to a phantasy, but just play with it.
Anyway, just some of my musings reading the story.
~Hans
The subtitle is: A Tale for Children.
No kidding? The subtitle wasn’t on the on-line version. I think I shall go about the rest of my day being rather pleased with myself.