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

The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother
	Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1984.
Author	Gabriel García Márquez
Country	Colombia
Language	Spanish
Publication date	1972

The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother (Spanish: La increíble y triste historia de la cándida Eréndira y de su abuela desalmada) is a 1972 short story by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez.

Plot summary[]

This is the story of a twelve year old who accidentally sets fire to the house where she lives with her grandmother. The grandmother decides that Erendira must pay her back for the loss, and sells her into prostitution in order to make money. The story takes on the characteristics of a bizarre fairy tale, with the evil grandmother forcing her Cinderella-like granddaughter to sell her body. They travel all over for several years, with men lining up for miles to enjoy her.

Meanwhile, Erendira falls in love. Her lover tries to poison the grandmother with arsenic in a birthday cake and to blow her up with a homemade bomb, but she survives all this and continues to dominate, until Erendira's lover finally stabs the grandmother to death. By the time he regains his composure, Erendira has fled alone.

Adaptations[]

The short story was adapted to the 1983 art film Eréndira, directed by Ruy Guerra. Irene Papas acted as the Grandmother and Cláudia Ohana as Eréndira. Violeta Dinescu's opera Eréndira, to a German-language libretto, premiered in 1992 in Stuttgart.^[1]

References[]

^ Christian Baier: "Hologramm existentieller Befindlichkeiten – Violeta Dinescus Eréndira" in: Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, vol. 48, nos. 10–11 (October 1993) doi:10.7767/omz.1993.48.1011.568 (in German)

External links[]

The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother, Esquire, 18 April 2014
Book review in The New Yorker

This article about a short story (or stories) published in the 1970s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .

[1] Christian Baier: "Hologramm existentieller Befindlichkeiten – Violeta Dinescus Eréndira" in: Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, vol. 48, nos. 10–11 (October 1993) doi:10.7767/omz.1993.48.1011.568 (in German)

[1]

v t Works by Gabriel García Márquez
Novels	In Evil Hour One Hundred Years of Solitude The Autumn of the Patriarch Chronicle of a Death Foretold Love in the Time of Cholera The General in His Labyrinth Of Love and Other Demons Memories of My Melancholy Whores
Short stories	Leaf Storm No One Writes to the Colonel Big Mama's Funeral The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother Strange Pilgrims The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Non-fiction	The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor Clandestine in Chile News of a Kidnapping Living to Tell the Tale
Speech	The Solitude of Latin America
Other	Macondo