4.5 stars overall
Chronicle of a Death Foretold (5 stars!)
Leaf Storm (4 stars)
No One Writes to the Colonel (4.5 stars)

Thank goodness I've finished this book. Depressing.

Well, I guess I'm not much for magical realism, because in the main these stories didn't do much for me. I did look up each story on Wikipedia to see if there was something major in the plots of these stories, put pretty much what you see is what you get. I did enjoy "No One Writes to the Colonel" enough that I might give it 3.5 stars if it stood alone. Significantly for me, Wikipedia says that this particular novella has fewer features of magical realism than others of this author's work, which may explain why I liked it more.

This is the first collection of stories that I've read my Márquez. My first introduction to him was through a magic realism course in college in which I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. That work is still my favorite, but I liked how Márquez began populating his fictional town with characters in "Leaf Storm", which was my favorite of the three stories. I just love the way Márquez brings his characters to life with all their imperfections and oddities, and I often wonder how he chose a specific combination of words or how he thought to use such a mundane description or fact to bring the character to life.

Despite the admirable craftsmanship of "Leaf Storm" and "No One Writes to the Colonel," I found those stories chilly and unengaging. The motivations of the characters are opaque (often even to themselves) and the reader is given few reasons to want to spend time in their world. In some ways, the first two novellas are more effective in conceptual than in literary terms - while the underlying ideas possess considerable symbolic resonance, the actual reading experience can verge on the tedious. However, "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" avoids these pitfalls and delivers a taut, intriguing story about complicity, memory and the cascading effects of individual choices. (It's probably not a coincidence that the characters in this novella are given the most to do, and have the most comprehensible reasons for doing it.) In "Chronicle," García Márquez displays his gifts as a writer to their best advantage, marrying the powerful prose of the earlier novellas with equally impressive plotting and characterization.

The third novella "Chronical of a Death Foretold" is excellent.
"No One Writes to the Colonel" is good.
"Leaf Storm" is OK

Enjoyed the first two more than the third, but all were well worth the read. These feature some of his least annoyingly written female characters, minor though they are.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the one that merits 5 stars. Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel were alright, but more interesting in the sense of seeing how Marquez maintains a strand of consistency between all of his books set in Macondo. The families from both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera are referenced in this collection of short stories, though not given any "screen time". Death Foretold has a style unlike any I've read before, in which the close friend of a murdered man tries to piece together the incredible apathy of Macondo which led to the marked man not to have been saved. I recommend it, before or after having read the Marquez novels.

It's Gabo. Of course it's great. I think Chronicle of a Death Foretold is the best though, but it all has his fabulous style.

I liked the 3rd story- Chronicle of a Death Foretold- best. It's not a book I would have previously picked up, but I used to find one author, read everything they wrote and then flounder until I found a new one to read. So even though it's ridiculous? pretentious? that when I see lists of books I immediately have to see how many I've read, at least it is expanding the books I'm reading.

1999 Perennial Classics edition. (Paperback). Different cover - man and woman's faces

Know first of all that Marquez is a Nobel Laureate in literature. If that means nothing to you than don't bother, you will not appreciate these little masterpieces. These works were infuriating, frustrating, disturbing, and most of all enlightening, regarding re-creating the gritty life-on-the-ground for certain small-town latin-American peoples of the early 20th century living under tin-pot dictators. Of course, the stories and flawed characters are much deeper than that superficial description would imply.