When you have an author who writes phrases like "fastened to life by the tiny roots of everyday things", it's easy to enjoy ANY story.

Leaf Storm: 4 stars
No One Writes to the Colonel: 3.5 stars
Chronicle of a Death Foretold: 3 stars

the first novella went over my head. but i quite like the second and third.

I only regret the finite amount of GGM left to read for the first time.

3.5 stars really. Pretty good.

The three novellas ranked:
1. No one writes to the colonel
2. Chronicles of a death foretold
3. Leaf storm

It’s a shame the collection includes leaf storm which kinda sucked.

But otherwise really great writing. Especially No one writes to the colonel, which swept me away. Such a clean, simple and beautifully sad story.

While reading GGM’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, I jumped back to read Leaf Storm, his first novel/ novella. Even though he claims he “had not yet learned to write” it’s astonishing to see how he twists time in this story. Loops it, knits it, stops it.

Three stories of death and dead men. Yet all three novellas passionately celebrate life in all its complexity. These novellas hit the ground running. Before the story has even truly begun, the reader is struggling to catch up as Marquez catapults forward with one bizarre and exceptional detail after another.

❝… blue banana trees in the moonlight, the sad swamps, the phosphorescent line of the Caribbean on the horizon. Santiago Nasar pointed to an intermittent light at sea and told us that it was the soul in torment of a slave ship that had sunk with a cargo of blacks from Senegal across from the main harbor mouth at Cartagena de Indias.❞
Chronicle of a death Foretold, 1981


These novellas are beautifully written. García Márquez weaves his magic with a kind of serene power that effortlessly transports you to a desolate Caribbean village in Colombia, almost without you even noticing.

"Chronicle of a Death Foretold," the third story in the collection, was by far my favorite. It’s a darkly witty small-town tale about the murder of Santiago Nasar, told through a journalistic lens. The mix of machismo, the cult of virginity, and the unraveling of fate is gripping. The romantic, almost dreamlike descriptions of the Caribbean setting hooked me from the start, adding an unforgettable charm to the story.

These then are 3 stories about death in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fictional Latin American town of Macombo. The first, "Leaf Storm," involves the coming and going of a leaf storm that brings people, prosperity, amusements and all manner of past and future only to take it all away as it swirls about an old man's effort to get a hanged man, a despised man in the community, a proper burial. The second tale, "No One Writes To The Colonel," is an excellent tale likewise and involves an aged colonel, a veteran of his country's civil wars, who, in the face of hunger and impending death and all manner of troubles, continues to hold onto his dreams with his cockfighting rooster. Every sentence is a thing of beauty. While the last novella in this book, "The Chronicle Of A Death Foretold," involves the entire town's complicity of a death of a man, the seducer of a rich man's fiancé in an honor killing. Every sentence and every paragraph has the ticking of a clock and the hand of fate, as the hunted man, Santiago, goes obediently to his demise. I suggest that you read these 3 stories about death. They are well told and show each in their own way why Senor Marquez won the Nobel Prize For Literature. It is an honor richly deserved. Enjoy every word.

Leaf Storm: meh; No One Writes to the Colonel: yeah!; Chronicle of a Death Foretold: yeah.

Loved Chronicle of a Death Foretold- other two novellas less memorable.

This is a book that is excellently written and interesting from the standpoint of living in South America.
BUT- the subject it deals with is death, and that is depressing.....

This man never fails to amaze me. His prose and voice is wise and gentle. This would be five stars if it weren't for Leaf Storm... it was quite circular. It was still amazing, but was hard to stay interested at times.

These novellas convey the dynamics, drama, trauma, pain, and love that small towns possess. Chronicle of a Death Foretold is so incredible, even more so on read number 2.