1 Year Death Anniversary Invitation Card

Gabriel García Márquez: The Colonel No One Writes to Charles C.

Original language: English
Year: 1961
Rating: Essential

[[[Much I slow (almost two years) review this novella, which however is among the indispensable my personal library, and belongs to the genre of the short story that I like (as seen in my review of The battles in the desert , Emilio Pacheco, not long ago). But ultimately, this is the chronicle of a review announced (pardon the obvious joke)]]] Gabriel García Márquez

has given us many masterpieces throughout his career. Most of all, surely, is Hundred Years of Solitude , which concentrated all its imaginative talent and style (his two great virtues), and transformed them into a magnum opus, complex and captivating; Chronicle of a Death announced (which incidentally, is also not yet reviewed, ahem) is a marvel of narrative technique, it works like a perfect clock and relentless, sometimes as The General in His Labyrinth or Love in the Time of Cholera help to give breadth and depth to his narrative. The Autumn of the Patriarch (which I did not like anything, and I've never managed to finish) was his foray into dictator novel and the novel experimental, simultaneously. And this must be added many other novels and volumes of short stories, Macondo or not, as The litter, the wrong time or Strange Pilgrims.

And in all this vast and brilliant work, what place does not have Colonel Writes? For a small, but special. One of the works in the cycle of Macondo, and even Aureliano Buendía is dropped (almost mythical reference) for the novel, however, is a novel far more realistic than others of the same cycle, and even gives the impression of being written in a more simple and less ornate (less adjective and metaphorical , come on) to other works of Gabo. But it is certainly an emotional novel, poetry also contained but powerful.

With more or less obvious references to Colombian history (the War of a Thousand Days or the period known as La Violencia ), the novel tells the story of Colonel, an old veteran in hopes of a pension never comes, and his wife asthmatic living than they can get pawning and selling their last possessions. His life revolves around a fighting cock, which belonged to his dead son, and in which they have put all their hopes of survival. But nothing comes, neither fight nor money, nor the official letter that Colonel expected Friday after Friday, when he finally announced the award of the pension you were promised.

Colonel is a sad work, no doubt, but with a sadness anything melodramatic. Its main characters, haunted by hunger, disease, aging, poverty and debt, never lose the dignity, freedom and ideals. And Gabo demonstrates once again, now in short distances, their ability to combine the emotional with the social, the political with the individual, style and fantasy.