asiem reviewed No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel García Márquez
Review of 'No One Writes to the Colonel' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Few authors succeed in making the mundane interesting, and [a:Gabriel García Márquez|13450|Gabriel García Márquez|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1588856705p2/13450.jpg] is right up there with them.
No One Writes to the Colonel follows the routine lives of an unnamed colonel and his wife, who cohabit their ramshackle house with a prize cock - the little savings they have are spent on ensuring the cock is kept healthy for upcoming cockfights. The bird serves as the only reminder of their son, Augustin, who was killed at a cockfight earlier in the year for distributing seditious literature. The oppressive regime in the unnamed South American country (where they live) has resulted in the colonel and his wife waiting for the colonel's pension for an unimaginable fifteen years. The colonel and his wife both have their pride, preventing them from uninhibitedly asking friends and neighbours for help. Only later in the story does the colonel, driven to a corner …
Few authors succeed in making the mundane interesting, and [a:Gabriel García Márquez|13450|Gabriel García Márquez|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1588856705p2/13450.jpg] is right up there with them.
No One Writes to the Colonel follows the routine lives of an unnamed colonel and his wife, who cohabit their ramshackle house with a prize cock - the little savings they have are spent on ensuring the cock is kept healthy for upcoming cockfights. The bird serves as the only reminder of their son, Augustin, who was killed at a cockfight earlier in the year for distributing seditious literature. The oppressive regime in the unnamed South American country (where they live) has resulted in the colonel and his wife waiting for the colonel's pension for an unimaginable fifteen years. The colonel and his wife both have their pride, preventing them from uninhibitedly asking friends and neighbours for help. Only later in the story does the colonel, driven to a corner by his situation, contemplate selling the cock to rapacious trader Salas. This novella is rife with metaphors, from letting go of the past, to being made to feel privileged because of the 'ownership' of a money-spinning item, to the shifty ways of fair-weather friends.
García Márquez maintains an oppressive atmosphere of sickness and decay throughout the story, and the dull, listless rain augments this atmosphere, until the reader is suffused with a sense of existential dread. The novella focuses on how the systems our countries erect, purportedly for our benefit, often overlook the bulk of our populace. The colonel hones in on the postman whenever he arrives by the ferry each Friday, in the fast diminishing hope that he would have brought along news of the colonel's pension, but to no avail.
There aren't any magical realism references in this novella, but this is García Márquez at perhaps his finest, honing in on the quotidian travails of an oppressed class under an authoritarian regime.
