2 1/2 starsThis isn't one of Gabriel García Márquez's magical realism books no matter what the Goodreads genres say. This is a collection of vignettes showing the terrible state of a country after a grand revolution. In this case Columbia but it might have been any number of places, human beings being what they are all over the world. It's like a story that comes after the big wedding and everyone toodled off smiling about the 'Happy Ever After'. This books seems to say 'well you got what you said you wanted, how's it going?'. And the answer is: Not very well at all.The bleak reality shown in these stories show a country suffering from so many wounds and disappointments it's hard to believe that it still functions. In all of these stories it fairly much doesn't but I guess the country itself is managing to hold itself together. I didn't much like the stories themselves, even the title one (No One Writes to the Colonel). They don't really go anywhere and just seem to be vehicles for Marquez to complain fairly endlessly about how crap Columbia is now. The men are selfish and/or violent arseholes, the women are punching bags and/or doormats on which the men can wipe their feet and life is terrible for everyone bar the corrupt few. I'm also not such a fan of his writing that I can read lots of plotless short stories (and some of them are really really short) that start and stop so abruptly that I wasn't sure that my audiobook wasn't faulty.So all of these stories aren't the sort of things I really enjoy reading but it got an extra half star because of the details it gave about Columbian life, however grim it was pretty interesting.

http://zimlicious.blogspot.com/Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been my favorite author for eleven years now. When I was a sophomore in high school, there was a book called Red Monday (English title: Chronicles of a Death Foretold) on our reading list. You know how they usually make you read physically big and heavy books in world literature class? Well, this one was a tiny book, and I suspected two things: 1) It was going to be such a tough book and we were all going to flunk the test; 2) It was such an amazing book that it didn't need that many pages. Of course, my second suspicion turned out to be true. After that I started down hunting down anything Marquez wrote and sucked on them like a fat kid sucks on ice cream.I know this turned into an anecdote when I'm supposed to be writing a review, but I just really REALLY love Marquez. Especially when the weather starts getting warm, one must read one of Marquez's works, doesn't matter which. He always meets expectations and exceeds them, and No One Writes to the Colonel is no exception.This story takes place within the same time line as Hundred Years of Solitude and My Melancholy Whores, during the Thousand Days' War. The fact that we never found out the names of the main characters of the story is proof of how insignificant human life was during those times in Colombia. The Colonel has been waiting for his pension payment to arrive for fifteen years. Whenever the postman is due to arrive in his town, he gets all dressed up and goes to get his pension payment, but he never receives any letters. The Colonel's son is dead, and he and his wife sell their belongings to make enough to live, yet after a while they run out of things of value to sell.His wife suggests the Colonel that they should sell the rooster, which is the only thing their son left them. The Colonel is a man with pride, and he doesn't like doing such things, but he has to. Later, his son's friends suggest that he should not sell the rooster and enter it to rooster fights instead. The story reflects what life was like during those times, how there was a lot of censorship going on and how a lot of people were in the same situation as the Colonel and his wife. Of course they weren't good times for those who were living it, but with Marquez'a beautiful story telling I found myself wanting to go and see it for myself.I suggest you read this book on a hot, lazy day and then take a good long nap.

Unlike many other Garcia Marquez works, the novel mostly does not fall within the magic realism genre, as it includes only one magical event.The main characters of the novel are not named, adding to the feeling of insignificance of an individual living in Colombia. The colonel and his wife, who have lost their son to political repression, are struggling with poverty and financial instability. The corruption of the local and national officials is evident and this is a topic which Garcia Marquez explores throughout the novel, by using references to censorship and the impact of government on society. The colonel desperately tries to sell their inheritance from their only son who is now dead and eventually the only reminder of his existence is a rooster that the colonel trains to take part in a cockfight.Garcia Marquez has said in interviews that his characteristic storytelling style is the style of his grandmother, and that some of his best characters are patterned after his grandfather, whom he calls the most important figure in his life. Discussing literary influences, he has acknowledged his debt to Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway all of whom lie behind the style of No One Writes to the Colonel.Although Garcia Marquez is a novelist, working within that genres basically mimetic pattern, his style is that of the modern romancer; it is lyric rather that realistic, highly polished and self-conscious rather than concerned only with mere external reality. His characters exist not in an as-if real world, but rather in a purely fictional world of his own making a combination of the folklore conventions of his South American heritage and the realism of the great modernist writers. The result is that reality is seen as more problematic and inexplicable than everyday experience would suggest.That his fictions take place in a political culture that seems unstable and adrift is not as thematically important as the fact that this unorganized social world makes possible his exploration of reality as governed by inexplicable forces. Thus, his characters, deprived of the props of established social order, have only their most elemental and primal virtues to sustain them. He is a metaphysical and poetic writer, not a propagandist or a social realist.Garcia Marquez, primarily because of the popular and critical reception of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", is perhaps the best-known writer in the Latin American explosion of talent that has taken place since the 1960s. Others in this modern tradition are Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, and Jose Donosoall of whom have created their own version of a Kafkaesque modernist world which has fascinated general readers and critics alike. "No One Writes to the Colonel" is a minor masterpiece in this tradition, a precursor to the complexity and control of "One Hundred Years of Solitude".The ending is epic:"The woman lost her patience.- And meanwhile what do we eat? - she asked, and seized the colonel by the collar of his flannel night shirt. She shook him hard.It had taken the colonel seventy-five years the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:- Shit.The Russian rock band "Bi-2" had a big hit in Eastern Europe with the song " " (Russian translation for "No One Writes to the Colonel") that was included in the soundtrack of the Russian film "Brat-2".