No One Writes to the Colonel (9 page)
Read No One Writes to the Colonel Online
Authors: Gabriel García Márquez,J. S. Bernstein
‘A masterly book’
Guardian
‘César Montero was dreaming about elephants. He’d seen them at the movies on Sunday …’
Only moments later, César is led away by police as they clear the crowds away from the man he has just killed.
But César is not the only
man to be riled by the rumours being spread in his Colombian hometown – under the cover of darkness, someone creeps through the streets sticking malicious posters to walls and doors. Each night the respectable townsfolk retire to their beds fearful that they will be the subject of the following morning’s lampoons.
As paranoia seeps through the town and the delicate veil of tranquility begins
to slip, can the perpetrator be uncovered before accusation and violence leave the inhabitants’ sanity in tatters?
‘
In Evil Hour
was the book which was to inspire my own career as a novelist. I owe my writing voice to that one book!’ Jim Crace
‘Belongs to the very best of Márquez’s work … Should on no account be missed’
Financial Times
‘A splendid achievement’
The Times
‘These stories abound with love affairs, ruined beauty, and magical women. It is the essence of Márquez’
Guardian
‘Eréndira was bathing her grandmother when the wind of misfortune began to blow …’
Whilst her grotesque and demanding
grandmother retires to bed, Eréndira still has floors to wash, sheets to iron, and a peacock to feed. The never-ending chores leave the young girl so exhausted that she collapses into bed with the candle still glowing on a nearby table – and is fast asleep when it topples over …
Eight hundred and seventy-two thousand, three hundred and fifteen pesos, her grandmother calculates, is the amount
that Eréndira must repay her for the loss of the house. As she is dragged by her grandmother from town to town and hawked to soldiers, smugglers and traders, Eréndira feels herself dying. Can the love of a virgin save the young whore from her hell?
‘It becomes more and more fun to read. It shows what “fabulous” really means’
Time Out
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one
else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘One of this century’s most evocative writers’ Anne Tyler
‘Márquez writes in this lyrical, magical language that no-one else can do’ Salman Rushdie
‘Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the centre of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm’
As a blizzard of warehouses and
amusement parlours and slums descends on the small town of Macondo, the inhabitants reel at the accompanying stench of rubbish that makes their home unrecognizable. When the banana company leaves town as fast as it arrived, all they are left with is a void of decay.
Living in this devastated and soulless wasteland is one last honourable man, the Colonel, who is determined to fulfil a longstanding
promise, no matter how unpalatable it may be. With the death of the detested Doctor, he must provide an honourable burial – and incur the wrath of the rest of Macondo, who would rather see the Doctor rot, forgotten and unattended.
‘The most important writer of fiction in any language’ Bill Clinton
‘Márquez is a retailer of wonders’
Sunday Times
‘An exquisite writer, wise, compassionate, and
extremely funny’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A treasure trove, a discovery of a lost land we knew existed but couldn’t find. A thrilling miracle of a book’
The Times
Living to Tell the Tale
spans Gabriel García Márquez’s life from his birth in Colombia in 1927, through his emerging career
as a writer, up to the 1950s and his proposal to the woman who would become his wife. Insightful, daring and beguiling in equal measure, it charts how García Márquez’s astonishing early life influenced the man who, more than any other, has been hailed as the twentieth century’s greatest and most-beloved writer.
