OK, Autumn of the Patriarch was a dud, but that's fine. Nobody bats 1.000. No One Writes to the Colonel is a novella - about sixty pages - about a colonel who keeps waiting. He keeps expecting his pension will show up in the next mail delivery. It doesn't. He has a fighting rooster that belonged to his son that he keeps, even when he and his wife can barely feed themselves, because if they just wait a few more months, until the fights, it will be worth so much. Assuming it wins. But it will win, it has to.
The colonel is a believer, maybe he has to be, to go war for what he believed in. They promised they would pay a pension, so he believes they will. The rooster is something that meant a lot to his son, so he'll keep it ready, even if it means selling everything else in the house that can be sold.
His wife doesn't seem to have the luxury. She's acutely aware they can't live on promises, and it's a question of whether she can sway him or not. And there's a complication of the interest the entire town has taken in the rooster. I've never lived in a place like that, where everyone knows everyone else's business, and I'm pretty glad about that.
The short stories are a mixed bag. There Are No Thieves in this Town was interesting, for all the things Marquez hints at between Damaso and Ana. The push-and-pull of their relationship, of Damaso's conflicting urges. Marquez is good at that, giving enough to let you make out the picture without belaboring the point. Sometimes.
Big Mama's Funeral is one where he belabors it far too much, going on and on about all the politicians wanting to attend, and even the Pope has to make his way there and on and on. At one point he's describing all the different "queens" in the procession, the banana girl, the soybean queen, the kidney-bean queen, before say others are omitted 'so as to not make this account interminable.' too late for that. The point seems to be for all this pomp, this dog-and-pony show about how great and beloved Big Mama was, once she's in the ground, all the people that were under her boot for decades are just ecstatic, and she's a footnote. Which is a decent enough point, but not terribly interesting to read.
Like I said, nobody bats 1.000, and there's more hits than misses here.
'For nearly sixty years - since the end of the last civil war - the colonel had done nothing else but wait. October was one of the few things which arrived.'
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