SOURCE: Sturrock, John. “A Wilder Race.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4720 (17 September 1993): 20.

In the following review, Sturrock offers a negative assessment of Strange Pilgrims, arguing that the collection is comprised of “facile stories, too easy on the mind, soft-centred and poorly focused.”

Strangeness is something that, in his last novel, The General in His Labyrinth, Gabriel García Márquez did unexpectedly well without. That was by his phantasmagorial lights a plain book, in which he movingly spelt out the last few, stricken weeks of life of Simón Bolívar, the deposed Liberator, as he made his way downriver to a melancholy death on the Caribbean coast. García Márquez had his factual sources to contend with in writing that story, and such embroidery as he allowed himself in impersonating his hero was of a far more responsible kind than anything we were used to from him...