No One Writes to the Colonel (11 page)
Read No One Writes to the Colonel Online
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez,J. S. Bernstein
‘The greatest novel in any language of the last 50 years. Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember
that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice …’
Pipes and kettledrums herald the arrival of gypsies on their annual visit to Macondo, the newly founded village where José Arcadio Buendía and his strong-willed wife, Úrsula, have started their new life. As the mysterious Melquíades excites Aureliano Buendía’s father with new inventions and tales of adventure, neither can know
the significance of the indecipherable manuscript that the old gypsy passes into their hands.
Through plagues of insomnia, civil war, hauntings and vendettas, the many tribulations of the Buendía household push memories of the manuscript aside. Few remember its existence and only one will discover the hidden message that it holds…
‘Should be required reading for the entire human race’
New York
Times
‘No lover of fiction can fail to respond to the grace of Márquez’s writing’
Sunday Telegraph
‘It’s the most magical book I have ever read. I think Márquez has influenced the world’ Carolina Herrera
‘Filled with greedy joys, with small pleasures, polished like apples against a sleeve’
Observer
‘The first thing Señora Prudencia Linero noticed when she reached the port of Naples was that it had the same smell as the port of Riohacha …’
Their distant,
nostalgic memories of home, their sense of anonymity in a foreign land, the terrifying pang of vulnerability they feel as they step over the threshold into an alien world …
Márquez’s strange pilgrims – the ageing prostitute preparing for death by teaching her dog to weep at her grave, the panicked husband scared for the life of his injured wife, the old man who allows his mind to wander on a
long-haul flight from Paris – experience with all his humour, warmth and colour, what it is to be a Latin American adrift in Europe or, indeed, any outsider living far from home.
‘Celebratory and full of strange relish at life’s oddness. The stories draw their strength from Márquez’s generous feel for character, good and bad, boorish and innocent’ William Boyd
‘The most important writer of
fiction in any language’ Bill Clinton
‘Often touching, often funny, always unexpected, the experience is as enriching as travel itself’
New Statesman
‘It asks to be read more than twice, and the rewards are dazzling’
Observer
‘Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up
the stagnant time inside …’
As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man laying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe. Their egocentric, maniacally violent leader, known for serving up traitors to dinner guests and drowning young children at sea,
can surely not die the humiliating death of a mere mortal?
Tracing the demands of a man whose egocentric excesses mask the loneliness of isolation and whose lies have become so ingrained that they are indistinguishable from truth, Márquez has created a fantastical portrait of despotism that rings with an air of reality.
‘Delights with its quirky humanity and black humour and impresses by its
total originality’
Vogue
‘Captures perfectly the moral squalor and political paralysis that enshrouds a society awaiting the death of a long-term dictator’
Guardian
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘The vigour and coherence of Márquez’s vision, the brilliance and beauty of his imagery, the narrative tension … coursing through his pages … makes it difficult to put down’
Daily Telegraph
At the age of forty-six General Simón Bolívar,
who drove the Spanish from his lands and became the Liberator of South America, takes himself into exile. He makes a final journey down the Magdalene River, revisiting the cities along its shores, reliving the triumphs, passions and betrayals of his youth. Consumed by the memories of what he has done and what he failed to do, Bolívar hopes to see a way out of the labyrinth in which he has lived all
his life …
