A review by larryebonilla
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories by Gabriel García Márquez

4.0

Read for class: Studies of World Literature: Gabriel Garcia Márquez

GGM writes with absolute intimacy and patience. This is a story of the failure of government systems, the act of taking and giving, and the dread of significance and need. In this story, the Colonel—a hard pressed and down-on-his-luck man—has to stress and weigh the strategies of maintaining a living. His dead son left a time-sensitively-valuable rooster, yet his wife is sick—dying. The community  believes in the worth of this Rooster, yet the coupled are pressed into a terribly difficult situation. Th is is especially effectively done with GMM’s use of the final line to emphasize the patient dread of a painful period between the now and the later.