Having been swept off of my feet after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude at age 16,
almost immediately afterwards I jumped into No
One Writes to the Colonel. Turns out, it was a rushed decision. Had I
waited a little more, I probably would have enjoyed the book a lot more.
The sadness of the daily struggles of the
colonel bored me when compared to the fascinating life of the other Colonel
(with a capital C), Buendía. Yet, I now think that the book would have deserved something better
than a couple of hours of distracted reading in my house’s “thinking room” (a
room so tiny that one couldn’t do anything other than thinking – yet one with
such a magnificent view over the Piedmontese hills and mountains that one just
couldn’t turn it into a store room).
A friend of mine (probably too lazy to read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but
sufficiently smart to realize that reading was actually potentially cool) kept on quoting the last line of the book and
constantly praised the novel. I never thought the last line of No One Writes to the Colonel was
particularly good or funny, but I now think that maybe the book does deserve
more credit than what I initially gave it.
