English · Chapter 12
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927-2014) was a Colombian novelist and short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. He is the best known writer of magical realism, a style in which impossible events are narrated calmly, as if they were part of ordinary life. "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" was written in 1968 and appeared in English in Leaf Storm and Other Stories (1972), translated by Gregory Rabassa. Its subtitle, "A Tale for Children", is ironic, because the real subject is how adults treat something they cannot explain. The story is prescribed in Unit 4 (Short Stories) of the NEB Grade 12 Compulsory English course.
The story opens in a small coastal village after three days of heavy rain. So many crabs have crawled into the house of Pelayo and his wife Elisenda that Pelayo spends the morning killing them and throwing them into the sea, because the couple believe the stench has given their newborn child a fever. Returning through the courtyard, Pelayo finds an old man lying face down in the mud, unable to rise because of a pair of enormous wings. The man is dressed like a ragpicker, almost bald and nearly toothless, and his huge buzzard wings are dirty and half-plucked. He speaks an incomprehensible dialect in a strong sailor's voice.