Jesse’s Reviews > Innocent Erendira and Other Stories > Status Update

“Someone Has Been Disarranging These Roses”

Another story about a spirit but this one is more up front. It’s from the ghost’s perspective but the narrator knows that he is a ghost, and he is trying to get the roses that… his childhood playmate?? Has been placing on his shrine?? Again, the cricket appears, and seems to be an apparatus of ghosts who are trying to move in the spiritual realm.

“The Woman Who Came At Six O’Clock”

Jose the restaurant owner loves a prostitute who comes into his restaurant every day. She’s agitated; we are told she is not her usual self. As he confesses his love to her she is charmed but also uses this to charm her… because she has likely murdered a client who terminally disgusted her and she needs a half hour alibi.

“Bitterness For Three Sleepwalkers”

Another surreal story documenting the dissolution of an apparently old woman. The cricket has been a prominent motif in these tales about the precipice of death and dying. A large part of this one focuses on the narrator realizing, too late I suppose, the humanity of the subject and the resulting shred of empathy he has.

“Dialogue With the Mirror”

Echoes of “The Other Side of Death” as the subject is a man who is contemplating the death of his twin, but this is a bit less introspective and more trying to skirt a subject that the MC is trying to avoid. Is the false image in the mirror an accusation? Did this man murder his twin? Or is he contemplating his suicide? What is going on here???

“Eva is Inside Her Cat”

This is another story about someone on the verge of death. In this one, the dead woman becomes a spirit and then tries to possess her cat, only to discover once she musters the effort that time passes at an incredibly different pace for a ghost, with a sort of “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” vibe. I am really liking the head space of this early phase of Márquez’s weird fiction.

“The Other Side of Death”

Sort of a companion piece to “The Third Resignation” where a man goes through an existential crisis after the death of his twin, examining his own mortality through a variety of angles, from the cancer that killed his brother to his existence as a twin, two halves of a whole, to his brother’s death as a physical representation of his own.

“The Third Resignation”

More of a prose poem about a boy who died at the age of seven and then was kept alive if inert for eighteen more years before finally crossing over from the living to the dead. This story is mostly about the psychodrama of being a conscious corpse. It’s only when he is comfortable with being dead that he dies, but once he dies he believes he’s alive and doesn’t want to be buried.

“Death Constant Beyond Love”

A Senator throws his political legacy away to conduct an affair with a young woman who was sent by her father as a way of securing a political favor. The only reason the senator agrees is because he is dying and has thus far refused the comfort of other human beings in his lonely suffering, not having told his wife or children of his terminal illness.

“The Sea of Lost Time”

A beautiful, bizarre story about a town that becomes influenced by a scent off the ocean breeze, something like nostalgia. When the philanthropist shows up and starts paying people money to do what they do best, the focus changes, and it’s way weirder when he takes Tobias out to swim in the ocean, discovering cosmological facts about the dead and, I suppose, where time goes.

“The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother”

This poor girl is one of Márquez’s tales of cruelty in One Years of Solitude. An overworked girl is blamed for burning down her grandmother’s manor and the horrid woman forces her granddaughter to prostitute herself in order to pay off a debt of 1,000,000 pesos.