Latin Hemmingway, didn't like him neither. Sorry. Perhaps for me it was just too personal. Brought back memories of related experiences of culture, family and the period of the "times".

Granted, Marquez is a master of flowery language and there are MANY Colombian colloquialisms in his work, but these translations are absolutely awful and tone-deaf. I am going to throw the book OUT, rather than donate it and subject someone else to this 'porqueria'. Too bad.

56/365 - 2022

Not my style of reading. I always wanted more closure with the characters and more explanations of the plot twists. I was often confused about what was happening and if I was understanding the plot correctly.

It feels blasphemous giving one of my favorite authors of all time this low of a rating—in all honesty, I wish I’d read the three novellas separately. Leaf Storm, the first novella in this collection, was a beautiful yet slow-paced re-introduction to his prose. As always, his characters are captivating; they speak and act unlike any characters you’ve read before, but have a startling reality to them. Regardless, the story itself wasn’t enough to keep me wanting more.

No One Write to the Colonel was a reread, but a much appreciated one. Immediately, I found the piece’s message and execution infinitely more poignant and powerful than the first. García Márquez demands our attention with his incisive critique. It’s both a hopeless story but manages to stay buoyant.

I loooooved Chronicle of a Death foretold. His fragmented storytelling shines through in the way I expected it to in Leaf Storm. I found myself laughing, my jaw dropping, everything. Can’t wait to reread it.

Overall, it was a 4 star collection (3 for Leaf Storm, 4 for No On Writes, 5 for Chronicle of a Death Foretold).

When I read a genius piece of work like One Hundred Years of Solitude, I always imagine that the ideas floated up to the author while he was in a sort of opium haze and he gathered them up with a jar and dipped a quill in the jar and wrote the story that way. That's why when I read this collection of shorts, I was kind of sad to see all of the inspiration that went into One Hundred Years of Solitude... the small town, the family dramas, society vs. the outsider, the pain that comes from following protocol - pride vs. survival, eh... well I could see where he got all of the material for his great opus is all - breaks the spell in a way.

I really enjoyed Collected Novellas - not as much as Visions of my Melancholy Whores though. As always, beautifully written, heartbreaking characterizations of repression.

It made me hopeful that a writer can start out as slightly better than mediocre with a sensitive, strong and colorful imagination, stir in life experience and with a little practice, can make One Hundred Years of Solitude. (Collected Novellas was the "slightly better than mediocre" part) But the good news is that mediocre for G.Marq is better than super super best of good for that Dan Brown fella.

Leaf Storm: 6/10
No One Writes to the Colonel: 7.5/10
Chronicles of a Death Foretold: 9/10

The n  throb of tragedyn is the overarching feeling of Collected Novellas, a book containing three novellas by Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Motifs run through the collection: the humble town setting, the intimidating march of technological progress, the inescapable wills of fate, the compelling characters, and the somewhat formal stylization of dialogue. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the most capable authors on delivering sheer Gravitas, and he excels in doing so even in 100-page doses.

n  Leaf Stormn. It is best to read Leaf Storm without having encountered metatext about it or One Hundred Years of Solitude. It offers a lot as a story by itself.

Primarily, it displays technical proficiency in the way it maximizes the literary device of shifting points of view. Garcia Marquez utilizes it as the means for the story's emotional arc. The story is first introduced by a young child who paints the scene without commentary (except for his own boyish discomfort with boring activities). It is exposition with enough hook (the morbidity of a corpse) that doesn't spoil the depth. Then, it is passed over to the mother, who knew not much about the dead but a lot about the social implications of her family burying an outcast. She gives the story urgency and stakes as she lays down the conflict: the doctor against the town. Finally, there is the Grandfather, the doctor's only confidant. His section reveals the depth of friendship, made possible by the perfect storm of a honorable colonel and a doctor conferred by a military superior.

A prose highlight of Leaf Storm talks about the extent the town hates the doctor, shown through their reaction to his death:

n  I couldn't articulate how much shame and ridicule there would be in burying this man whom everyone had hoped to see turn to dust inside his lair. Because people hadn't just expected that, they'd prepared themselves for things to happen that way and they'd hoped from the bottom of their hearts, without remorse, and even with the anticipated satisfaction of someday smelling the pleasant odor of his decomposition floating through the town without anyone's feeling moved, alarmed, or scandalized, satisfied rather at seeing the longed-for hour come, wanting the situation to go on and on until the twirling smell of the dead man would satisfy even the most hidden resentments.n  
n  —Page 11, Leaf Stormn

What I considered weakest about Leaf Storm is its emotional core: the relationship between the colonel and the doctor. Generally, the first novella has many points for emotional contact, and most of them are empathetic and affecting. But those are the supplementary emotions. I feel like a truly perfect story dedicates itself to fleshing out its core. If not by weight/amount, at least by thematic arrangement.

The colonel’s promise and the doctor’s life-saving service are the thrust for the story’s only action. This arrangement is hinted at throughout the story, then eventually revealed as a monumental commitment. Simultaneous to the mystery of the burial, the reader is incrementally told the doctor’s life. It was engaging as an intellectual exercise, the bits of personhood coming together like a puzzle being slowly solved. However, to me it doesn’t ever transform beyond that. He’s withdrawn, unhelpful, cruddy in both superficial and meaningful ways. Coming from the opposite direction, the enigmatic nature of the doctor isn’t alluring enough to be a Pandora’s box situation.

When the reveal is given, it’s like an edgepiece placed to complete a puzzle. It’s too logically simple to evoke the emotional catharsis of earned completion.

n  No One Writes to the Colonel.nNo One Writes to the Colonel is one of the most popular works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I can see why. It engages with concepts captivating to the humanistic and dramatic reader alike. We read about a dignified man’s faded valor as well as the collusions of the rich and the government. We read about parental grief’s complex manifestations as well as state repression under martial law. No One Writes to the Colonel captures the way that “the personal” is aggravated by “the political”. It’s a story situated in a specific time and place, a direct outcome of political circumstances. All these hefty concepts naturally, amazingly, sharply, intersect over a rooster.

The couple’s escalating desperation, the methodical revelation of the rooster’s connection to the dead son, and the colonel’s portrait of restraint galvanize, thereby escaping corniness and earning this exchange:

n  ”You can’t eat hope,” the woman said.
“You can’t eat it, but it sustains you,” the colonel replied.n  
n  —Page 157, No One Writes to the Coloneln

n  A Chronicle of a Death Foretoldn. My favorite one out of this collection. The story earns the label “Chronicle”, as the perfectly told novella leans into impressing drama upon the reader, making use of every character to its fullest thematic and plot extent, and employs various moods and paces. A Chronicle of a Death Foretold became, at one point or another, murder investigation, fight scene, unrequited romance, family legend. As it went through this wild course, it was engaging at every point.

n  They didn't hear the shouts of the whole town, frightened by its own crime n  
n  —Page 273, A Chronicle of a Death Foretoldn

The unique theme of A Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the question of people’s complicity in violence when it is considered as equal in weight to the slighted social convention it is reacting towards. The narrative flip-flops between the murder as Fate’s machinations and the collective decision of several people. On one hand, Angela Vicario’s virginity is a social construct, and the townspeople literally just stood by to watch Santiago Nasar murdered in its honor. On the other hand, the amount of coincidences that foiled the attempts of those who did try to intervene, and the amount of happenstances that ensured Pedro Vicario and Pablo Vicario’s knives landed true throw in just enough ambiguity for us, for the townspeople themselves, to question it.

It was really interesting to read sincere explorations about Fate, as contemporary books (at least, those I encounter) don’t attempt to engage with Fate. Or at least, not explicitly. Definitely not in a way that suggests an exploration in its grandiose scale.

One highlight for me was in the text exploring Fate, wherein Garcia Marquez ropes in representatives of the state. Specifically, the mayor (the government) and the priest (the church). It works rhetorically as a commentary of the state’s incompetence in averting crime. The mayor’s only reaction to men with explicitly murderous intent and two sharp knives was to take those two specific knives away. Meanwhile, the priest says that “my first thought was that it wasn’t any business of mine but something for the civil authorities.” It also works as a way to illustrate the magnitude to which Fate made certain of Santiago’s murder.

Another highlight for me was the entire storyline of Angela Vicario and Bayardo San Roman. It’s so starkly feudal, so drippingly romantic. The imagery that composed their love story are so cute and sappy: a man deciding that a woman will be his wife after laying his eyes on her, a demure lady setting impossible promises, a town-wide wedding party, a marriage ending in 5 hours, a rejected wife persisting with one-sided correspondence, a husband coming to her doorstep several years later with her unopened letters in hand. Normally, I would be staunchly against this whole thing on principle (and I have to say Bayardo rejecting his wife over her virginity is Really Fucked Up), but this entire thread placed within the context of the bloody murder of a cattle rancher and child molester was the reprieve that really balanced A Chronicle of a Death Foretold for me. I think for me, as far as this novella was concerned, one wouldn’t have worked without the other.


n  Final Thoughtsn
Usually, I get through 100-page books over two days. I finished Collected Novellas, a 300-page book, over the weekend because I couldn’t put it down. It’s really great to read a pitch-perfectly written book in order to feel revitalized about literature again, to recover some enthusiasm after being demoralized by disappointing work. Collected Novellas made me want to revisit One Hundred Years of Solitude, it gave me new hope for the potential of novellas and short story collections, and it made me think I’m more open to romance than I thought.

These three short novels from the early, middle, and late periods of Garcia Marquez's career remind me a little of the Beethoven string quartets. The first one, Leaf Storm, is least like the others, and has a wild, poetic quality. It's rich in atmosphere, but I found it a bit messy and difficult to read. His style and story-telling is simpler, incredibly lithe, and most powerful in No One Writes to the Colonel, an almost Godot-like story. The Colonel's dark sense of humor is a vein of gold that runs through this depiction of unrelenting injustice and poverty. It's Garcia Marquez's Op. 59, his middle period masterpiece. The last story-- Chronicle of a Death Foretold -- is slower, deliberate, and heavy. It's his Op. 133, an immense fugue in which the same theme is repeated, but the variations are shockingly beautiful, despite their gravity. There's something baroque about this story, like an elaborately worked iron gate that bars an old house as haunted as the 20th century. It's not for everyone, I know, but for me it's as scary as anything Lovecraft ever wrote.

Leaf Storm-good. No One Writes to the Colonel-good. Chronicle of a Death Foretold-mehhh.

I really need to stop reading any of Marquez's early works. It was staggering how boring and uneventful Leaf Storm and No One Writes To The Colonel were, ESPECIALLY when you read them back-to-back with Chronicle of a Death Foretold. The latter is absolute genius; the former ones...well, Shit Storm and No One Writes Anything Interesting About the Colonel would have been better titles.

3.5
No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of A Death Foretold both amazingggggg

None of these are bad. No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of a Death Foretold are well-written and really disturbing on some level-- Chronicle through it's intensity and general horribleness, Colonel in a quieter way. Leaf Storm was less good, but still not painful to read. Problem is; despite my finding them well-done, I feel fairly indifferent towards them. They are probably best read one by one rather than one after the other. They probably hit harder that way.

Also (other than some vaguely irregular occurrences in Chronicle) there are no flowers falling from the sky or people suddenly flying-- which I miss.