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A review by psheehy
No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories by Gabriel García Márquez
2.0
It's not exactly fair to compare No One Writes to the Colonel to Gabriel García Márquez's other works—after all, at the time of its publication in 1961, Colonel was only his second major work—but it's not exactly avoidable, either. That's what a Nobel Prize will do for a writer's oeuvre. The problem is that García Márquez, like most career writers, obsessed over much of the same thematic material time and time again: South American loneliness and political unrest. Colonel fits right into that back pocket. So there's not a lot of ground covered here that wasn't first covered in Leaf Storm (1955), or later in the masterful One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). In fact, García Márquez dances around the same fictional town of Macondo, and there's more than one mention of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, who would figure to be a main character in One Hundred Years.
What's missing, however, is García Márquez's flair for magical realism, and the effect is a little flattening. At its best, No One Writes to the Colonel creates a very real and cohesive universe, where it's 104 degrees in the shade and everyone in town knows everyone else. Structurally, the collection is divided in two, with the title story, "No One Writes to the Colonel," stretching out over the first sixty pages, and the subsequent eight shorter stories grouped under the heading "Big Mama's Funeral." All these stories inhabit the same space, a plus for any short story collection, yet the stories themselves are mostly forgettable. While the title story succeeds with its sluggish pace—the protagonist waits week after week for fifteen years, with Waiting for Godot-like determination, for a letter containing his military pension that never comes—the same cannot be said for the rest of the stories, which tend to stagnate. What the reader is left with, then, is a good example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. These are stories that work best together, and they work to create a universe that the author will revisit with great success. So at the end of the day, the reader will remember what it was like to walk around that town. But what happened there will have long since melted in the sun.
What's missing, however, is García Márquez's flair for magical realism, and the effect is a little flattening. At its best, No One Writes to the Colonel creates a very real and cohesive universe, where it's 104 degrees in the shade and everyone in town knows everyone else. Structurally, the collection is divided in two, with the title story, "No One Writes to the Colonel," stretching out over the first sixty pages, and the subsequent eight shorter stories grouped under the heading "Big Mama's Funeral." All these stories inhabit the same space, a plus for any short story collection, yet the stories themselves are mostly forgettable. While the title story succeeds with its sluggish pace—the protagonist waits week after week for fifteen years, with Waiting for Godot-like determination, for a letter containing his military pension that never comes—the same cannot be said for the rest of the stories, which tend to stagnate. What the reader is left with, then, is a good example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. These are stories that work best together, and they work to create a universe that the author will revisit with great success. So at the end of the day, the reader will remember what it was like to walk around that town. But what happened there will have long since melted in the sun.