Book review: No One Writes to the Colonel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of my biggest fears is to be old, broke, alone, and afraid. I wonder why more people don’t feel and fear this eventuality.
Perhaps if they read No One Writes to the Colonel
This is an extremely short novella. In these hundred or so pages, Nobel Prize winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez paints a picture of a man’s desperate existence vividly.
Is it pulse-pounding? Is it full of twists and turns? Is it a page-turner?
No it’s not. It’s not in the way that life usually is not. It’s not in the way that especially senior life is not.
The central couple in the story is in states of perpetual waiting. The Colonel is waiting for his long-promised pension and a sure-to-be-champion rooster to come due. His wife is waiting for him.
Until something happens, they just have to make it day to day—figuring out food, fuel, their social status in a small town—while knowing that their days of action are behind them. Their days of having something happen are behind them.
This is not a happy book.
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